- If you or someone you know thought Trump might be a good President because he’s a business man well part of the problem with that is Trump is not even a good business man. He inherited a lot of his money from his father and it’s easy to get more rich when you get people to do work for you then you don’t pay them. And do you consider 6 bankruptcies a good business man? And Trump built his business empire in no small part with a lot of dirty money from a lot of dirty Russians. Another part of the problem with thinking Trump might be a good President because he’s a business man is business and government do not work the same way, not even close.
- The Trumps and their residential properties were well known in New York to New York residents for their long time history of housing discrimination. Since Trump’s father, Fred C. Trump, was a racist he and his racist son, Donald J. Trump, who refused to rent apartments to African American tenants, were sued by the federal government’s Justice Department for racial housing discrimination. Trump claimed the government was trying to force him to rent to “welfare recipients”. But the complaints of discrimination went well beyond just New York City though, there were complaints of discrimination in Norfolk and there was also a lawsuit brought against Trump’s properties in Cincinnati, Ohio as well. Trump even went so far as to counter sue the federal government for defamation and filed a contempt of court charge against the government as well. The Trumps battled against the government for two years just so they would not have to sign a consent decree until they eventually gave up. Trump claimed victory because there was no admission of guilt in the consent decree but there normally was no admission of guilt in a consent decree. Then a few years later the government started to bring a second lawsuit against the Trumps for violating the consent decree but it expired before the Justice Department could bring the second lawsuit.
Whether one considers Trump a good business man or not there is no disputing that Trump’s residential properties have grown. There are more than 400 condo units worth $250 million in the USA alone, anyone with enough money could buy one or multiple units or purposefully overpay for units, even foreign governments or officials, from the President of the United States. The purchases could easily be made by either fake groups or people that used fake names. In addition to enriching Trump’s pocket they also pay for access to the President of the United States and can ask for things. This is a huge conflict of interest. Since Election Day Trump sold at least 14 condo units and home building lots for about $23 million, half of them were sold to LLCs with no names listed in deeds. That doesn’t even count Trump’s ownership of millions of square feet of office and retail rental space in multiple states. There have been buyers and renters of Trump properties from at least a dozen different countries. As an example of just one of the buyers, just before Trump was elected a fake foreign company spent $3.1 million to buy 11 condo units. On the deeds from the fake foreign company’s purchases Eric Trump signed for the sellers, an accountant signed for the buyers, and the deeds do not identify any people behind the fake foreign company at all. Not all of the LLC companies are set up for nefarious purposes, celebrities protecting their privacy, foreign dissidents hiding assets from an oppressive government, or law enforcement officers worried about their safety from criminals have bought properties under LLCs. However, the bulk of Trump’s income is from real estate property sells and leases and business for Trump is up, probably better than ever since he has become President. So several transactions were flagged in a lawsuit against Trump by an ethics watchdog group, alleging Trump violates the Emoluments Clause of the US Constitution, which forbids government officials from taking gifts from foreign powers.
Additional conflicts of interests exist with both new and existing Trump branded buildings in foreign countries, even though Trump himself does not own the Trump branded buildings, like the existing Trump Tower Istanbul in Turkey. Turkey’s elected President Erdoğan became a dictator so of course Trump congratulated him on that. Or like the new Trump Tower Manila in the Philippines with similar issues. The Trump branded tower, in Manila’s Makati district, wasn’t quite finished as of November 22, 2016, but it will top out at 57 stories. Brokers online are asking around $750,000 for a one-bedroom apartment in a city where the average worker takes home less than $10 a day. Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte appointed the real estate magnate, the chairman of Century Properties and one of the Philippines’ highest-profile businessmen, Jose E.B. Antonio, the man building Trump Tower Manila, as a special trade envoy to the United States. So Trump invited Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte to the White House even though Duterte is slaughtering his own people in his abusive “war on drugs” without even so much as any type of trial, which has resulted in the deaths of countless Filipinos, many of them poor. Duterte aspires to kill as many people as Hitler did. Possible crimes against humanity have prompted warnings from the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in The Hague in the Netherlands. Apparently crimes against humanity don’t matter to Trump as long as there is money to be made.
In 1984, a Russian émigré named David Bogatin went shopping for apartments in New York City. The 38-year-old had arrived in America seven years before, with just $3 in his pocket. But for a former pilot in the Soviet Army—his specialty had been shooting down Americans over North Vietnam—he had clearly done quite well for himself. Bogatin wasn’t hunting for a place in Brighton Beach, the Brooklyn enclave known as “Little Odessa” for its large population of immigrants from the Soviet Union. Instead, he was fixated on the glitziest apartment building on Fifth Avenue, a gaudy, 58-story edifice with gold-plated fixtures and a pink-marble atrium: Trump Tower.
A monument to celebrity and conspicuous consumption, the tower was home to the likes of Johnny Carson, Steven Spielberg, and Sophia Loren. Its brash, 38-year-old developer was something of a tabloid celebrity himself. Donald Trump was just coming into his own as a serious player in Manhattan real estate, and Trump Tower was the crown jewel of his growing empire. From the day it opened, the building was a hit—all but a few dozen of its 263 units had sold in the first few months. But Bogatin wasn’t deterred by the limited availability or the sky-high prices. The Russian plunked down $6 million to buy not one or two, but five luxury condos. The big check apparently caught the attention of the owner. According to Wayne Barrett, who investigated the deal for the Village Voice, Trump personally attended the closing, along with Bogatin.
If the transaction seemed suspicious—multiple apartments for a single buyer who appeared to have no legitimate way to put his hands on that much money—there may have been a reason. At the time, Russian mobsters were beginning to invest in high-end real estate, which offered an ideal vehicle to launder money from their criminal enterprises. “During the ’80s and ’90s, we in the US government repeatedly saw a pattern by which criminals would use condos and high-rises to launder money,” says Jonathan Winer, a deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement in the Clinton administration. “It didn’t matter that you paid too much, because the real estate values would rise, and it was a way of turning dirty money into clean money. It was done very systematically, and it explained why there are so many high-rises where the units were sold but no one is living in them.” When Trump Tower was built, as David Cay Johnston reports in The Making of Donald Trump, it was only the second high-rise in New York that accepted anonymous buyers.
In 1987, just three years after he attended the closing with Trump, Bogatin pleaded guilty to taking part in a massive gasoline-bootlegging scheme with Russian mobsters. After he fled the country, the government seized his five condos at Trump Tower, saying that he had purchased them to “launder money, to shelter and hide assets.” A Senate investigation into organized crime later revealed that Bogatin was a leading figure in the Russian mob in New York. His family ties, in fact, led straight to the top: His brother ran a $150 million stock scam with none other than Semion Mogilevich, whom the FBI considers the “boss of bosses” of the Russian mafia. At the time, Mogilevich—feared even by his fellow gangsters as “the most powerful mobster in the world”—was expanding his multibillion-dollar international criminal syndicate into America.
Since Trump’s election as president, his ties to Russia have become the focus of intense scrutiny, most of which has centered on whether his inner circle colluded with Russia to subvert the US election. A growing chorus in Congress is also asking pointed questions about how the president built his business empire. Representative Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, has called for a deeper inquiry into “Russian investment in Trump’s businesses and properties.” The very nature of Trump’s businesses—all of which are privately held, with few reporting requirements—makes it difficult to root out the truth about his financial deals. And the world of Russian oligarchs and organized crime, by design, is shadowy and labyrinthine. For the past three decades, state and federal investigators, as well as some of America’s best investigative journalists, have sifted through mountains of real estate records, tax filings, civil lawsuits, criminal cases, and FBI and Interpol reports, unearthing ties between Trump and Russian mobsters like Mogilevich. To date, no one has documented that Trump was even aware of any suspicious entanglements in his far-flung businesses, let alone that he was directly compromised by the Russian mafia or the corrupt oligarchs who are closely allied with the Kremlin. So far, when it comes to Trump’s ties to Russia, there is no smoking gun.
But even without an investigation by Congress or a special prosecutor, there is much we already know about the president’s debt to Russia. A review of the public record reveals a clear and disturbing pattern: Trump owes much of his business success, and by extension his presidency, to a flow of highly suspicious money from Russia. Over the past three decades, at least 13 people with known or alleged links to Russian mobsters or oligarchs have owned, lived in, and even run criminal activities out of Trump Tower and other Trump properties. Many used his apartments and casinos to launder untold millions in dirty money. Some ran a worldwide high-stakes gambling ring out of Trump Tower—in a unit directly below one owned by Trump. Others provided Trump with lucrative branding deals that required no investment on his part. Taken together, the flow of money from Russia provided Trump with a crucial infusion of financing that helped rescue his empire from ruin, burnish his image, and launch his career in television and politics. “They saved his bacon,” says Kenneth McCallion, a former assistant US attorney in the Reagan administration who investigated ties between organized crime and Trump’s developments in the 1980s.
It’s entirely possible that Trump was never more than a convenient patsy for Russian oligarchs and mobsters, with his casinos and condos providing easy pass-throughs for their illicit riches. At the very least, with his constant need for new infusions of cash and his well-documented troubles with creditors, Trump made an easy “mark” for anyone looking to launder money. But whatever his knowledge about the source of his wealth, the public record makes clear that Trump built his business empire in no small part with a lot of dirty money from a lot of dirty Russians—including the dirtiest and most feared of them all.
Over the years, Trump and his sons would try and fail five times to build a new Trump Tower in Moscow. But for Trump, what mattered most were the lucrative connections he had begun to make with the Kremlin—and with the wealthy Russians who would buy so many of his properties in the years to come. “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets,” Donald Trump Jr. boasted at a real estate conference in 2008. “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”
The money, illicit and otherwise, began to rain in earnest after the Soviet Union fell in 1991. President Boris Yeltsin’s shift to a market economy was so abrupt that cash-rich gangsters and corrupt government officials were able to privatize and loot state-held assets in oil, coal, minerals, and banking. Yeltsin himself, in fact, would later describe Russia as “the biggest mafia state in the world.” After Vladimir Putin succeeded Yeltsin as president, Russian intelligence effectively joined forces with the country’s mobsters and oligarchs, allowing them to operate freely as long as they strengthen Putin’s power and serve his personal financial interests. According to James Henry, a former chief economist at McKinsey & Company who consulted on the Panama Papers, some $1.3 trillion in illicit capital has poured out of Russia since the 1990s.
On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams A stunning report in The New Republic alleges that, whether Donald Trump knew it or not, for decades he made a large portion of his personal fortune from Russian mobsters & oligarchs.
- Trump’s dealings with Wall Street stretch back decades to his attempt to build an Atlantic City casino empire. That badly timed push forced him to renegotiate with creditors when he couldn’t pay back billions of dollars in loans. His major backers in that era included Citbank, Chase Manhattan Bank and Bankers Trust, a bank that was acquired by Deutsche Bank in 1999, and the debacle left a trail of angry lenders. Deutsche Bank’s relationship with Trump actually predates its Bankers Trust purchase. In 1998, a small group of its real-estate bankers led by Mike Offit underwrote a $125-million loan for renovations on Trump’s building at 40 Wall Street. Trump showed up at Offit’s office, his reputation badly bruised. Deutsche Bank’s fledgling property business, in operation for only a year at the time, was the only group willing to take on Trump, Offit said in an interview. “I had one way to succeed, that was to make this thing big and profitable,” said Offit, who is now retired and has written a novel about Wall Street. “If I was super conservative and wasn’t willing to do some unusual stuff, how was I going to compete?”
In 2005, the bank approved a $640 million construction loan so Trump could build his name-sake tower in Chicago. The tower, with dozens of multimillion-dollar condos, broke ground at the height of the real-estate boom. As the project neared completion, the financial crisis hit, sending the global real-estate market crashing. And when part of the loan came due, rather than pay it, Trump sued a lending consortium led by Deutsche Bank for $3 billion. His suit argued that the financial crisis was equivalent to an earthquake, triggering a “force majeure” clause, which allows for a payback extension in extraordinary circumstances. Deutsche Bank countersued, claiming Trump owed a $40 million payment, which was a personal guarantee on the debt. The two later settled and, surprisingly, continued doing business together. Today, Trump owes about $300 million to the bank, nearly half of his outstanding debt, according to a July analysis by Bloomberg. That figure includes a $170-million loan Trump took out to finish his hotel in Washington. He also has two mortgages against his Trump National Doral Miami resort and a loan against his tower in Chicago. All four debts come due in 2023 and 2024. Garten said the Chicago loan no longer has Trump’s personal guarantee because the project has been completed.
July 19th 2017 as reported in the New York Times: During the presidential campaign, Donald J. Trump pointed to his relationship with Deutsche Bank to counter reports that big banks were skeptical of doing business with him. After a string of bankruptcies in his casino and hotel businesses in the 1990s, Trump became somewhat of an outsider on Wall Street, leaving the giant German bank among the few major financial institutions willing to lend him money. Now that two-decades-long relationship is coming under scrutiny. Banking regulators are reviewing hundreds of millions of dollars in loans made to Trump’s businesses through Deutsche Bank’s private wealth management unit, which caters to an ultrarich clientele, according to three people briefed on the review who were not authorized to speak publicly. The regulators want to know if the loans might expose the bank to heightened risks.
Separately, Deutsche Bank has been in contact with federal investigators about the Trump accounts, according to two people briefed on the matter. And the bank is expecting to eventually have to provide information to Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel overseeing the federal investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. It was not clear what information the bank might ultimately provide. Generally, the bank is seen as central to understanding Trump’s finances since it is the only major financial institution that continues to conduct sizable business with him. Deutsche Bank has also lent money to Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, and to his family real estate business.
Although Deutsche Bank recently landed in legal trouble for laundering money for Russian entities — paying more than $600 million in penalties to New York and British regulators — there is no indication of a Russian connection to Trump’s loans or accounts at Deutsche Bank, people briefed on the matter said. The bank, which declined to comment, scrutinizes its accounts for problematic ties as part of so-called “know your customer” banking rules and other requirements.
On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams In his stunning interview with The New York Times, Trump said if Special Counsel investigates too deep into his finances that would be a ‘red line.’ Charlie Sykes & Eugene Robinson react.
The stand-off over records from the Treasury Department’s financial intelligence section led Democratic Senator Ron Wyden to hold up the nomination of Trump’s pick for undersecretary of the treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence, New York attorney Sigal Mandelker, until investigators have access to the federal banking records, which detail suspicious financial transactions around the globe. A vote on her nomination is on the calendar for this week, suggesting the two sides are close to a deal. “We’re in talks right now,” Wyden told ABC News on Monday (June 19th 2017). “I’m hopeful we’ll be able to get what we need.”
Senate investigators have been in talks with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, since May over access to the banking records. “I have stated repeatedly that we have to follow the money if we are going to get to the bottom of how Russia has attacked our democracy,” he said in May. “That means thoroughly review any information that relates to financial connections between Russia and Trump and his associates, whether direct or laundered through hidden or illicit transactions.
The office which Ms. Mandelker has been nominated to head is responsible for much of this information.” A spokesman for FinCen declined to comment, citing a policy “to never confirm or deny or comment on any investigations.” FinCEN, the Treasury agency responsible for tracking the illegal movement of money, maintains a database of millions of transactions that have been flagged by banks as unusual or problematic, known as suspicious activity reports, or SARs. Law enforcement agencies around the country have access to the information, but so far, congressional investigators have not had access. “SARs have proven to be useful to criminal investigators in understanding financial relationships, identifying or confirming links between various parties, identifying patterns of illicit conduct and establishing new leads to be explored,” said Daniel Glaser, who served as undersecretary of the treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence in the Obama administration.
In addition to tracking bank transactions, FinCEN monitors the suspicious movement of money through real estate and casinos, two sectors that were prominent aspects of Trump’s business empire for many years. In February 2015, Trump Taj Mahal Associates agreed to pay a $10 million civil penalty to FinCEN and admitted to having willfully violated reporting and recordkeeping requirements under the federal Bank Secrecy Act from 2010 to 2012. Trump relinquished most of his interest in the casino in 2009, before it declared bankruptcy. The casino was hit with a civil penalty of $477,000 in 1998 for similar reporting violations that dated as far back as 1991, according to records obtained by ABC News through the Freedom of Information Act.
Senate investigators have been looking for financial ties linking top Trump campaign aides to Russian and Eastern European businessmen, in part to determine whether any of their dealings involved criminals or those subject to US financial sanctions. One of several areas of interest, sources familiar with the investigation told ABC News, has been the pool of investors who helped finance construction of the Trump SoHo building in New York City. Several names associated with the financing effort have alleged ties to money laundering or Russian organized crime.
ABC News previously reported on the role in the Trump SoHo project of Felix Sater, a twice-convicted felon who served prison time and had documented Russian mafia connections. Trump Organization attorneys dismissed Sater’s role as minor and short-lived. Sater resurfaced earlier this year, however, at a meeting with Trump’s personal attorney, Michael Cohen, and a Ukrainian official, purportedly to discuss a Ukrainian peace proposal. Documents promoting the SoHo project identified one investor as Alexander Machkevich, a prominent Kazakh businessman who in 2011 was charged in Belgium with money laundering, a case that was eventually dropped. The Financial Times reported that the case was closed after Machkevich and two other defendants paid a fine, while making no admission of guilt.
Among the suspicious transactions tracked by FinCEN are filings from banks required anytime they engage in a transaction involving more than $10,000 in cash. Many millions of these reports are filed each year. “As illicit financial activity is often conducted in cash, [the reports] are a valuable source of leads for criminal investigators,” Glaser said. “SARs and CTRs [currency transaction reports] have proven highly useful to criminal investigators,” Glaser said. “They are not, however, a magic bullet.”
- The Justice Department inquiry led by Mueller now has added flavors. The Post noted that the investigation also includes “suspicious financial activity” involving “Russian operatives.” The New York Times was more specific in its account, saying that Mueller is looking at whether Trump associates laundered financial payoffs from Russian officials by channeling them through offshore accounts.
If Russia is involved with Trump, either through potentially compromising US business relationships or through funds that flowed into his wallet years ago, in that context, a troubling history of Trump’s dealings with Russians exists outside of Russia: in a dormant real-estate development firm, the Bayrock Group, which once operated just two floors beneath the president’s own office in Trump Tower. Bayrock partnered with the future president and his two eldest children, Donald Jr. and Ivanka, on a series of real-estate deals between 2002 and about 2011, the most prominent being the troubled Trump Soho hotel and condominium in Manhattan. During the years that Bayrock and Trump did deals together, the company was also a bridge between murky European funding and a number of projects in the US to which the president once lent his name in exchange for handsome fees. Icelandic banks that dealt with Bayrock, for example, were easy marks for money launderers and foreign influence, according to interviews with government investigators, legislators, and others in Reykjavik, Brussels, Paris and London.
Trump testified under oath in a 2007 deposition that Bayrock brought Russian investors to his Trump Tower office to discuss deals in Moscow, and said he was pondering investing there. “It’s ridiculous that I wouldn’t be investing in Russia,” Trump said in that deposition. “Russia is one of the hottest places in the world for investment.”
One of Bayrock’s principals was a career criminal named Felix Sater who had ties to Russian and American organized crime groups. Before linking up with the company and with Trump, he had worked as a mob informant for the US government, fled to Moscow to avoid criminal charges while boasting of his KGB and Kremlin contacts there, and had gone to prison for slashing apart another man’s face with a broken cocktail glass. In a series of interviews and a lawsuit, a former Bayrock insider, Jody Kriss, claims that he eventually departed from the firm because he became convinced that Bayrock was actually a front for money laundering. Kriss has sued Bayrock, alleging that in addition to laundering money, the Bayrock team also skimmed cash from the operation, dodged taxes and cheated him out of millions of dollars. Sater and others at Bayrock would not comment for this column; in court documents they have contested Kriss’s charges and describe him, essentially, as a disgruntled employee trying to shake them down. But Kriss’s assertion that Bayrock was a criminal operation during the years it partnered with Trump has been deemed plausible enough to earn him a court victory: In December, a federal judge in New York said Kriss’s lawsuit against Bayrock, which he first filed nine years ago, could proceed as a racketeering case.
Trump has said over the years that he barely knows Sater. In fact, Sater, who former Bayrock employees say met frequently with Trump in the Trump Organization’s New York headquarters, once shepherded the president’s children around Moscow and carried a Trump Organization business card, apparently has remained firmly in the orbit of the president and his closest advisers. Sater made the front page of the New York Times in February for his role in a failed effort, along with Trump’s personal attorney, Michael Cohen, to lobby former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn on a Ukrainian peace proposal.
On The Rachel Maddow Show Rachel Maddow looks at the checkered past of a Donald Trump business associate who may become a legal liability to Trump, and reports on the new access by the Senate Trump Russia investigation to FinCEN documents that will help them follow Trump’s money.
On The Rachel Maddow Show Tim O’Brien, executive editor and columnist at Bloomberg View, talks with Rachel Maddow about how Donald Trump’s past business dealings could integrate with the Trump Russia investigation.
Kriss, a one-time Bayrock executive, also accused lawyers for defendant Felix Sater of trying to “gravely mislead” the court into looking at the underlying issues as a typical business dispute inappropriate for a RICO action. Sater’s portrayal of the case “is patently false … unless a ‘garden variety’ business or employment dispute involves threats of bodily dismemberment … [and] a man convicted of defrauding investors of approximately $40 million acting as a shadow manager of a group of business entities that he used like piggy banks,” the filing states. The case, initially filed in 2010, claims Bayrock — a New York-based real estate development company primarily owned by Sater and another named defendant, Tevfik Arif, starting in 2002 — collaborated with Trump on hotel projects while concealing the fact that Sater had been convicted of a felony related to the mafia and was allegedly skimming money.
Kriss and Ejekam, also a former Bayrock member, accuse Sater, Arif and others connected to Bayrock and related entities of fraudulently inducing them into working for Bayrock in exchange for ownership stakes and then engaging in a series of misdeeds and illegal payments. The motion also accuses Sater of trying to use an old cooperation agreement with prosecutors to explain away an alleged nondisclosure of his previous legal troubles. “Sater’s counsel appear to be under the unfortunate misimpression that the twice-convicted felon’s over-a-decade-old cooperation agreement gives him carte blanche to engage in all manner of illicit conduct for the remainder of his life,” the filing states. The once-sealed initial complaint was publicized by the Associated Press in a December 2015 story detailing ties between Trump and Sater.
Former employees of Bayrock Group LLC, a real estate developer with ties to Donald Trump, have hit back at a bid to sanction them over their long-running suit alleging that the company committed offenses under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. Ex-finance director Jody Kriss and service provider Michael Chu’ di Ejekam, told a New York federal judge in a letter filed in the court docket Friday (February 3rd 2017) that they oppose Bayrock’s requests to sanction them for alleged misrepresentations and baseless factual contentions and to redact portions of a transcript of a deposition given by Kriss. “The public has a right to access the materials upon which the Bayrock defendants seek the harshest of sanctions — dismissal of the action in its entirety — and to scandalize Mr. Kriss and the undersigned firm,” lawyers Bradley D. Simon and J. Evan Shapiro of Simon & Partners LLP wrote on behalf of Kriss and Ejekam in their letter to Magistrate Judge Debra C. Freeman dated Feb. 1.
Bayrock on Friday (February 3rd 2017) filed a motion for sanctions as well as a letter to Judge Freeman addressing the redaction of language from the deposition transcript that was sealed in an arbitration. While “the Bayrock defendants believe the complete letter may be filed publicly,” the deposition testimony was given more than nine years ago in a now-resolved arbitration relating to a Bayrock development, Bayrock’s lawyer Walter A. Saurack wrote.
To expand his real estate developments over the years, Donald Trump, his company and partners repeatedly turned to wealthy Russians and oligarchs from former Soviet republics — several allegedly connected to organized crime, according to a USA TODAY review of court cases, government and legal documents and an interview with a former federal prosecutor. The president and his companies have been linked to at least 10 wealthy former Soviet businessmen with alleged ties to criminal organizations or money laundering. Among them:
• A member of the firm that developed the Trump SoHo Hotel in New York is a twice-convicted felon who spent a year in prison for stabbing a man and later scouted for Trump investments in Russia.
• An investor in the SoHo project was accused by Belgian authorities in 2011 in a $55 million money-laundering scheme.
• Three owners of Trump condos in Florida and Manhattan were accused in federal indictments of belonging to a Russian-American organized crime group and working for a major international crime boss based in Russia.
• A former mayor from Kazakhstan was accused in a federal lawsuit filed in Los Angeles in 2014 of hiding millions of dollars looted from his city, some of which was spent on three Trump SoHo units.
• A Ukrainian owner of two Trump condos in Florida was indicted in a money-laundering scheme involving a former prime minister of Ukraine.
Trump’s Russian connections are of heightened interest because of an FBI investigation into possible collusion between Trump’s presidential campaign and Russian operatives to interfere in last fall’s election. What’s more, Trump and his companies have had business dealings with Russians that go back decades, raising questions about whether his policies would be influenced by business considerations. Trump told reporters in February: “I have no dealings with Russia. I have no deals that could happen in Russia, because we’ve stayed away. And I have no loans with Russia. I have no loans with Russia at all.” Yet in 2013, after Trump addressed potential investors in Moscow, he bragged to Real Estate Weekly about his access to Russia’s rich and powerful. “I have a great relationship with many Russians, and almost all of the oligarchs were in the room,” Trump said, referring to Russians who made fortunes when former Soviet state enterprises were sold to private investors.
Five years earlier, Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. told Russian media while in Moscow that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets” in places like Dubai and Trump SoHo and elsewhere in New York. New York City real estate broker Dolly Lenz told USA TODAY she sold about 65 condos in Trump World at 845 U.N. Plaza in Manhattan to Russian investors, many of whom sought personal meetings with Trump for his business expertise. “I had contacts in Moscow looking to invest in the United States,” Lenz said. “They all wanted to meet Donald. They became very friendly.” Many of those meetings happened in Trump’s office at Trump Tower or at sales events, Lenz said.
Dealings with Russian oligarchs concern law enforcement because many of those super-wealthy people are generally suspected of corrupt practices as a result of interconnected relationships among Russia’s business elite, government security services and criminal gangs, according to former US prosecutor Ken McCallion, as well as Steven Hall, a former CIA chief of Russian operations. “Anybody who is an oligarch or is in any position of power in Russia got it because (President) Vladimir Putin or somebody in power saw some reason to give that person that job,” Hall said in an interview. “All the organized crime figures I’ve ever heard of (in Russia) all have deep connections and are tied in with people in government.”
John Dowd, one of Trump’s lawyers, said on Thursday (July 20th) that he was unaware of the inquiry into Trump’s businesses by the two-months-old investigation and considered it beyond the scope of what Special Counsel Robert Mueller should be examining. “Those transactions are in my view well beyond the mandate of the Special counsel; are unrelated to the election of 2016 or any alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia and most importantly, are well beyond any Statute of Limitation imposed by the United States Code,” he wrote in an email.
The president told the New York Times on Wednesday (July 19th) that any digging into matters beyond Russia would be out of bounds. Trump’s businesses have involved Russians for years, however, making the boundaries fuzzy. The Justice Department’s May 17 order to Mueller instructs him to investigate “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign” as well as “any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation,” suggesting a relatively broad mandate.
Agents are interested in dealings with the Bank of Cyprus, where Wilbur Ross served as vice chairman before he became commerce secretary. In addition, they are examining the efforts of Jared Kushner, the President’s son-in-law and senior aide, to secure financing for some of his family’s real-estate properties. The information about the investigation was provided by someone familiar with the developing inquiry but not authorized to speak publicly. The roots of Mueller’s follow-the-money investigation lie partly in a wide-ranging money-laundering probe launched by then-Manhattan US Attorney Preet Bharara last year, according to the person.
FBI agents already had been gathering information about Manafort, according to two people with knowledge of that probe. Prosecutors hadn’t yet begun presenting evidence to a grand jury. Trump fired Bharara in March. The Manafort inquiry initially focused on actions involving a real-estate company he launched with money from Ukraine in 2008. By the time Bharara was fired, his office’s investigation of possible money laundering extended well beyond that, according to the person briefed on the Mueller probe. The Bharara investigation was consolidated into Mueller’s inquiry, showing that the special counsel is taking an overarching approach. The various financial examinations constitute one thread of Mueller’s inquiry, which encompasses computer hacking and the dissemination of stolen campaign and voter information as well as the actions of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. Joshua Stueve, Mueller’s spokesman, declined to comment, as did a Manafort spokesman and Abbe Lowell, a lawyer for Kushner. Spokesmen for the White House, Trump Organization and Ross didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
Mueller’s team is looking at the Trump SoHo hotel condominium development, which was a licensing deal with Bayrock Capital LLC. In 2010, the former finance director of Bayrock filed a lawsuit claiming the firm structured transactions in fraudulent ways to evade taxes. Bayrock was a key source of capital for Trump projects, including Trump SoHo. The 2013 Miss Universe pageant is of interest because a prominent Moscow developer, Aras Agalarov, paid $20 million to bring the beauty spectacle there. About a third of that sum went to Trump in the form of a licensing fee, according to Forbes magazine. At the event, Trump met Herman Gref, chief executive of Russia’s biggest bank, Sberbank PJSC. Agalarov’s son, Emin, helped broker a meeting last year between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer who was said to have damaging information about Hillary Clinton and her campaign.
Another significant financial transaction involved a Palm Beach, Florida, estate Trump purchased in 2004 for $41 million, after its previous owner lost it in bankruptcy. In March of 2008, after the real-estate bubble had begun losing air, Russian fertilizer magnate Dmitry Rybolovlev bought the property for $95 million. As part of their investigation, Mueller’s team has issued subpoenas to banks and filed requests for bank records to foreign lenders under mutual legal-assistance treaties, according to two of the people familiar with the matter.
On The Rachel Maddow Show Rachel Maddow looks at some of the background of former Donald Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort that is being looked at in the Trump Russia investigation and notes that if Trump is afraid the investigation is getting to close, he’ll have to fire Jeff Sessions before he can fire Robert Mueller.
On The Rachel Maddow Show Greg Farrell, investigative reporter for Bloomberg News, talks with Rachel Maddow about Special Counsel Robert Mueller including Donald Trump’s personal business and finances as part of the Trump Russia investigation.
- As reported in the August 21st 2017 Issue of The New Yorker: Donald Trump’s attorney Jay Sekulow recently told me that the investigation being led by Robert Mueller, the special counsel appointed by the Justice Department, should focus on one question: whether there was “coördination between the Russian government and people on the Trump campaign.” Sekulow went on, “I want to be really specific. A real-estate deal would be outside the scope of legitimate inquiry.” If he senses “drift” in Mueller’s investigation, he said, he will warn the special counsel’s office that it is exceeding its mandate. The issue will first be raised “informally,” he noted. But if Mueller and his team persist, Sekulow said, he might lodge a formal objection with the Deputy Attorney General, Rod Rosenstein, who has the power to dismiss Mueller and end the inquiry. President Trump has been more blunt, hinting to the Times that he might fire Mueller if the investigation looks too closely at his business dealings.
Several news accounts have confirmed that Mueller has indeed begun to examine Trump’s real-estate deals and other business dealings, including some that have no obvious link to Russia. But this is hardly wayward. It would be impossible to gain a full understanding of the various points of contact between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign without scrutinizing many of the deals that Trump has made in the past decade. Trump-branded buildings in Toronto and the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan were developed in association with people who have connections to the Kremlin. Other real-estate partners of the Trump Organization—in Brazil, India, Indonesia, and elsewhere—are now caught up in corruption probes, and, collectively, they suggest that the company had a pattern of working with partners who exploited their proximity to political power.
One foreign deal, a stalled 2011 plan to build a Trump Tower in Batumi, a city on the Black Sea in the Republic of Georgia, has not received much journalistic attention. But the deal, for which Trump was reportedly paid a million dollars, involved unorthodox financial practices that several experts described to me as “red flags” for bank fraud and money laundering; moreover, it intertwined his company with a Kazakh oligarch who has direct links to Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin. As a result, Putin and his security services have access to information that could put them in a position to blackmail Trump. (Sekulow said that “the Georgia real-estate deal is something we would consider out of scope,” adding, “Georgia is not Russia.”)
The waterfront lot where the Trump Tower Batumi was supposed to be built remains empty. A groundbreaking ceremony was held five years ago, but no foundation has been dug. Trump removed his name from the project shortly before assuming the Presidency; the Trump Organization called this “normal housekeeping.” When the tower was announced, in March, 2011, it was the centerpiece of a bold plan to transform Batumi from a seedy port into a glamorous city. But the planned high-rise—forty-seven stories containing lavish residences, a casino, and expensive shops—was oddly ambitious for a town that had almost no luxury housing.
On The Rachel Maddow Show Adam Davidson, staff writer for The New Yorker, talks with Rachel Maddow about why a sketchy Donald Trump real estate deal in the nation of Georgia could expose Trump to legal problems, not to mention Russian “Kompromat.”
- And what is Trump hiding in his taxes? He just keeps lying and claiming that he’s under audit and he can’t show his taxes while he’s under audit even though various people from the IRS have said that there is nothing stopping Trump from showing his taxes, if he wanted to, even if he was under audit. All Presidents have been under an automatic audit and still released their tax returns, even Nixon released his tax returns while under audit (a real audit). And there is no proof that Trump’s taxes even are under any audit at all. When the IRS audits people they send a letter stating such, we haven’t even seen that letter, Trump just has some letter from his own attorney claiming that Trump’s taxes from year 2009 on are under continuous audit, it’s absurd, so there is absolutely no proof of any audit of any of Trump’s taxes at all. We, the American people, need to see what the various conflicts of interest are, what the foreign entanglements are, and how any tax law changes would benefit Trump and his family. Then suddenly Trump or someone released 2 pages (which is not the full tax return because the various tax schedules were not included) of Trump’s 2005 tax return (stamped with “Client Copy”) to David Cay Johnston of DC Report.org (https://www.dcreport.org/) who appeared on The Rachel Maddow Show to report about it. That was probably the best tax return Trump ever had which is probably why he or someone released that particular tax return. But since the return was from 12 years ago and since it was not the full return with the various schedules included we still could not get a picture of the various conflicts of interest, the foreign entanglements, and how any tax law changes would benefit Trump and his family even from 12 years ago. Trump claimed that only the media cared about his taxes but that was not true because people around the country had a tax day, on April 15th 2017, protest demanding for Trump to release his tax returns.
On The Rachel Maddow Show Rachel Maddow looks at the few times authorities have looked at Donald Trump’s financial bookkeeping and why that explains Trump’s apparently anxiety over the possibility that Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation will include Trump’s finances.
On The Rachel Maddow Show David Cay Johnston, investigative journalist and founder of DCReport.org, talks with Rachel Maddow about Donald Trump’s legal exposure through his financial records and why Trump’s legal representation isn’t what one would expect.
- Trump and his family have been trying to use his position as President, and even before he was sworn in, to take himself and his family from being billionaires to being trillionaires, Trump and his family have been raking in the money. Trump’s campaign paid Trump millions for Trump’s campaign expenses like Trump flying on his own plane, Trump’s relatives were paid for unspecified campaign activities and Trump’s campaign paid to rent space in Trump properties, including Trump Tower in New York where Trump lived. And Trump’s campaign continued to pay Trump after the election for what is now considered Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign. After the election Trump had business stuff on government websites. By January Trump doubled the price of membership at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s resort in Florida that he started referring to as the “Winter White House”, from $100,000. to $200,000. plus tax, and on top of that members also have to pay $14,000 a year in annual dues plus tax. Trump is at Mar-a-Lago fairly often so if you have the money to join the membership to Mar-a-Lago and other properties also offers a chance to meet with Trump and ask him for things too.
On All In with Chris Hayes Thing 1/Thing 2: President Trump is on what he insists is a working vacation at his property in Bedminster, New Jersey, but he found time to play some golf and interact with wedding guests – as a brochure for Bedminster weddings said he would.
On All In with Chris Hayes Despite expectations it would lose money in the first four months of the year, the hotel instead made a 2 million dollar profit.
On The Rachel Maddow Show Jonathan O’Connell, reporter for The Washington Post, talks with Joy-Ann Reid about how the Trump International Hotel on Washington, D.C., functions as a social center of political influence for Republican politicians and still makes money for Donald Trump despite the obvious conflict.
On The Rachel Maddow Show Richard Painter, chief White House ethics attorney for the G.W. Bush administration, talks with Joy-Ann Reid about the lawsuit against Donald Trump over his use of the presidency as a money-making gimmick.
On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams House Oversight Committee Democrats are asking federal agencies and Cabinet members whether your tax dollars are ending up in the hands of Trump’s businesses. Our panel discusses.
Trump’s inauguration team raised a record breaking $107 million which doubled the previous record of Mr. Obama’s inauguration which was $53 million. But Trump’s inauguration was much smaller than Mr. Obama’s inauguration was and Trump’s inauguration did not include any major high dollar entertainment acts like Mr. Obama’s inauguration did such as Beyoncé; there was not $107 million worth of inauguration. Prompting some people to ask where is the rest of the money? We know what the high dollar donors got in return for their money, access to Trump and the National Security Council to ask for things or as Trump put it when he accused Hillary of doing it during the campaign; “Pay for Play”, (oh, did I mention Trump is a huge hypocrite). And on top of that some of the donations were made by either fake groups or people that used fake names, which is apparently fraud. But what is Trump doing with that money? Trump’s inauguration team claimed that the leftover money would be given to charity but in the months since the inauguration they still haven’t given it to any charity yet. Just how long does it take to find a charity to give money to, not that long. Where do you think that money is, I suspect it’s in their pockets. And on top of that they kept raising money even after the inauguration, $7.1 million during the months since Trump’s inauguration, supposedly for Trump’s re-election campaign.
At least some of the campaign donation money has been found, On The Rachel Maddow Show Rachel Maddow shares reporting on how Trump re-election campaign money is being used to pay for lawyers, including for Donald Trump Jr., and attempts to sort through some of the contradictory announcements made about changes in the Trump team’s legal representation.
June 28th 2017 with 40 months to go Trump hosts his first reelection fundraiser, the earliest of any sitting president. The fundraiser, which people have paid anywhere from $35,000 to upwards of $110,000 to attend, was held at Trump’s second residence along Pennsylvania Avenue, the Trump International Hotel. Being in a continuous campaign mode is profitable. In 2000, Trump speculated that he could “be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it,” and there is evidence to support the claim that he has profited off of both the campaign and the presidency. When Trump initially set up his campaign headquarters at Trump Tower, he prided himself on being self-funded with a low-cost operation. He later quadrupled the rent to $169,758 after he began receiving funds from donors even though he employed less staff than in the months prior.
The pattern of profiteering off his initial run is continuing into his reelection campaign. According to FEC filings, the Trump campaign has sent $274,000 in rent to his offices in Trump Tower, even though his reelection campaign only employs 20 people. That works out to about $91,000 a month, which is more than half of what he paid at the height of his campaign when 168 employees were on payroll. So donors who are paying upwards of $110,000 to attend Wednesday (June 28th) night’s event for Trump’s reelection campaign, are also funneling funds back to Trump twice. First, through the Trump hotel for the space, food and drinks. Second, the money that’s left over will go to Trump’s campaign expenses, which includes rent at Trump Tower. Because he still retains ownership, any event hosted at a Trump Organization Property by Trump the president, also benefits Trump the businessman. Trump has also found ways to leverage the presidency to advance his business interests outside of his campaign. Read more here. On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams Former Watergate prosecutor Nick Akerman joins guest host Nicolle Wallace calling Trump and the RNC holding a fundraiser at Trump’s own D.C. hotel ‘worse than the Teapot Dome scandal.’
Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., was charging for stuff that does not usually get charged for, both of Trump’s sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., were going above and beyond by offering high dollar donors extra stuff like multi-day hunting or fishing trips with them and private receptions and meetings with their father and Trump’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, offered coffee with her as a prize to the highest bidder of an auction. And one of Trump’s advisors, Kellyanne Conway, was saying to go buy Trump’s daughter, Ivanka’s, products. That’s just a few examples, among the many, of how Trump is using this public office for his private gain, Trump does not have the best interest of this country in mind he has his own best interest and that of his family’s in mind and that’s not a good thing for any country. And there is a reason why this kind of thing was not supposed to happen in the US. On All In with Chris Hayes, Trump properties flourishing after Trump’s many visits, The President has spent a full quarter of his presidency visiting Trump properties – and it’s been a huge boon to the Trump Organization’s bottom line.
- In 2012 Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as CEO running his own family’s real estate firm, The Kushner Companies, partnered with Israel’s Steinmetz family (which built a fortune as diamond traders) on real estate deals buying more than 40 buildings (or about $318 million worth) over several months in New York and New Jersey. Kushner’s most recent partnering with Steinmetz, in 2014, was on a $200 million Trump branded building in Jersey City. Steinmetz is being investigated by law enforcement in 4 different countries but in the United States Steinmetz is being investigated for money laundering and bribing a government official in Guinea in West Africa over iron ore mining deals. Kushner (who does not have to be corrupt himself but who knew about the corrupt business practices) doing business with a corrupt foreign company, Steinmetz, is a violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which is a crime. The case went to court in New York April 24th. Not that he has anything to do with Trump or Kushner what so ever but Frederic Bourke of the company Dooney & Bourke (they make luxury fashion accessories like purses and shoes) already went to jail for the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act so it is a real crime.
Even Kushner’s family and specifically Jared Kushner’s sister Nicole Kushner Meyer, is trying to get even richer from Trump’s position as President and Jared Kushner’s position as Trump’s Senior Adviser. At events in Beijing and Shanghai China wealthy Chinese investors were encouraged to invest $500,000. in Kushner’s New Jersey luxury apartment complex and that would help them secure what’s known as an investor visa. The tagline on a brochure for the events: “Invest $500,000 and immigrate to the United States.”
On The Rachel Maddow Show Rachel Maddow previews three stories that are likely to shape the week’s White House news, including Reince Priebus talking with Robert Mueller, a Kushner associate in legal trouble, and a new look at sketchy Trump real estate deal.
NBC’s Chief Business Correspondent, Ali Velshi, who is a totally bald–headed man, said “he has a better chance of growing a full, thick afro” than the economy growing to 4%, 5% or 6%, enough to cover the tax cuts proposed by the Trump White House. The Washington Post reported that many budget experts say they believe the White House’s plan would reduce federal revenue by so much that it would grow the debt by trillions of dollars in the next decade, growing interest costs and slowing the economy. But Trump also wants to do massive military spending and then there’s the mass deportations he’s doing. And the plus is Trump’s partial budget also known as a “skinny budget” cuts out most protections for most of the people who need them the most. The Democrats managed to win the budget battle and to keep most protections for most of the people who need them the most at least until September 2017. But then Trump got mad and threatened to shut down the government in September 2017, tweeting “Our country needs a good “shutdown” in September to fix mess!”. I do not know how or what Trump thinks shutting down the government will fix. Shutting down the government will not only not fix anything but what it would do is damage the economy more than he is already threatening to do. Trump’s team released its first full budget proposal on May 23rd 2017, which is the more complete version to the “skinny budget”, and CNN tells what this full version of Trump’s budget cuts and why. This budget is no better than Trump’s previous budget. Both Republican and Democratic Congressional Representatives say that Trump’s budget is DOA (Dead On Arrival). He’s going to crash the economy again. Trump makes Bush look smart; at least it took Bush 8 years to crash the economy I don’t think it will take Trump even 4 years to do it. Lawrence O’Donnell talks to Senator Elizabeth Warren about Trump’s proposed budget cuts, Michael Flynn pleading the Fifth, and how the Trump-Russia investigation may make it easier for Trump to get his legislative agenda through Congress.
On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell Lawrence O’Donnell explains the difference between the tax reform Democrats want and the tax cuts Republicans want… and why President Trump’s confusion on taxes could hurt Republican efforts to cut taxes on the rich.
Does anyone, other than me, find it hypocritical that the Republicans always claim that we do not have any money for anything but yet they always want big tax cuts for the rich so we have even less money for anything? And after 8 years of complaining about the deficit while Mr. Obama was in office that the Republicans let Bush create, because he started with the surplus that Clinton left, suddenly the deficit is no longer an issue again like when Bush was in office. There is a pattern here, the Republicans get into office and run up the debt with big tax cuts for rich people and leave giant deficits. Then the Democrats have to come in and recover and clean up the mess that the Republicans leave. It was the most pronounced with the surplus that Clinton left, then Bush spent that surplus and ran up a giant deficit to the point that he crashed the economy, then Obama came in and recovered and cleaned up as much as he could, now here is yet another Republican who will leave yet another giant mess for the next President to have to recover and clean up from. When is this circle going to end? Have some common sense people, please. Unless you make $1 million or more per year then you are voting against your own interests if you vote for Republicans. Regardless of any other issues, there is no reason to vote for Republicans if you are not rich and 90% to 99% of us are not rich, especially when it comes to economic issues, they are not good at economic issues and their economic policies will never benefit you. Republicans say anything to get elected but once in office they always do the same things. Break the cycle.
