- Would you consider someone who creates a fake university, one that takes peoples money and they don’t learn anything from the fake university a crook?
- Would you consider some who writes big checks to pay prosecutors that are considering suing them a crook?
- Would you consider someone who creates a fake charity that takes in money but uses it for their own purposes, like buying paintings of themselves or paying off personal court debts, a crook?
- Would you consider someone who is sued under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act (basically a corrupt illegal business) with links to Russian organized crime (Russian Mafia) and money laundering a crook?
- Would you consider someone who is sued for fraud a crook?
- Would you consider someone who assaults women by grabbing their crotches against their will a crook?
- Would you consider someone who, on a regular basis, gets people to do work for them but either does not pay them what they are supposed to or does not pay them at all a crook?
If so then Trump is a crook to you too, those are just a few of the crooked things Trump has done. Trump settled the fake university lawsuit for $25 million just before the inauguration; seems like fraud to me. However, before Trump settled the fake university lawsuit there were prosecutors, such as Pam Bondi, Florida’s Attorney General, who were considering whether to bring a lawsuit against Trump’s fake university until Trump paid them with big checks then the decision was made to not bring a lawsuit against Trump’s fake university; seems like bribery to me.
The investigators are still investigating the fake charity scam. And on June 6th 2017 Forbes reported yet another charity scam, Trump has been ripping off the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital through the Trump National Golf Club with annual golf events. The charity actually ran well at first when Trump’s son, Eric Trump, ran things but then Donald Trump got involved and started funneling money into his own business, that’s Self Dealing. Here, on All In with Chris Hayes, Chris Hayes talks about how Trump skimmed money meant for sick kids. Eric Trump said he was raising money for cancer research at a golf course donated by his dad. But it turns out Donald Trump was charging.
In the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act lawsuit the judge struck down evidence that implicated Trump in the SOHO New York racketeering conspiracy. On June 17th 2016, Ex-finance director Jody Kriss responded to a dismissal motion targeting his third amended complaint, saying in his motion that Bayrock leaders had planned and structured businesses from conception as criminal enterprises intended to defraud investors. Kriss also accused lawyers for Bayrock co-owner Felix Satter of trying to “gravely mislead” the court into looking at the underlying issues as a typical business dispute inappropriate for a RICO action.
The case, initially filed in 2010, claims Satter and another co-owner, Tevfik Arif, collaborated with Trump on hotel projects starting in 2002 while concealing that Satter had been convicted of a felony related to organized crime and was allegedly skimming money. In February 2017, Judge Schofield struck down a court order preventing the dissemination of emails connected to the case that allegedly implicated a number of law firms, including Nixon Peabody LLP and Roberts & Holland LLP, along with Trump SoHo New York, in the racketeering conspiracy.
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.”
In addition to the RICO Act lawsuit brought by Trump’s ex-partners against Trump there was also a fraud lawsuit brought by buyers of Trump SOHO against Trump. Donald Trump and the promoters of his Trump SoHo hotel-condominium were sued by buyers who accused them of fraudulently touting out-sized sales figures to encourage them to buy units and inflate the project’s financial health. The lawsuit by 15 plaintiffs was filed late Monday (August 2nd 2010) in Manhattan federal court, less than four months after the 46-story building opened and three months after the offering plan went effective, allowing closings to begin. Trump SoHo is a venture between the Trump Organization, which manages the building, and Bayrock Group LLC and Sapir Organization LLC, which formed its sponsor Bayrock/Sapir Organization LLC. The smallest units start at $1.2 million.
The complaint said the defendants in sales pitches and to the media during the first 18 months of marketing advertised that the building was “30, 40, 50, 60 percent or more sold.” Instead, when the offering plan went effective, buyers learned that just 62 of the 391 units, or 16 percent, had been sold, the complaint said. A minimum of 15 percent was needed for the plan to go effective. Many banks will not lend to buyers of condominium units when sponsors still own a large percentage of the units, often 50 percent. Lawyers believe there can be greater risks when that happens because of the sponsors’ obligations to their own lenders and to the condominium itself.
“Not only were the plaintiffs individually misled into signing their contracts,” lawyer Adam Leitman Bailey wrote, “the defendants’ collective efforts to pump up sales through false and misleading statements caused all buyers to miss an option to revoke their contract that they all should have had in the absence of fraud.” The complaint seeks to rescind purchase contracts, a refund of $1.75 million of deposits and punitive damages.
The backdrop to that unusual denouement was a gathering legal storm that threatened to cast a harsh light on how Trump did business. Besides the fraud accusations, a separate lawsuit claimed that Trump SoHo was developed with the undisclosed involvement of convicted felons and financing from questionable sources in Russia and Kazakhstan. And hovering over it all was a criminal investigation, previously unreported, by the Manhattan district attorney into whether the fraud alleged by the condo buyers broke any laws, according to documents and interviews with five people familiar with it. The buyers initially helped in the investigation, but as part of their lawsuit settlement, they had to notify prosecutors that they no longer wished to do so.
And Trump got sued again for his latest non payment of people that did work for him. And, among other issues, not paying people for their work is coming back at Trump, he is having a hard time getting top attorneys to represent him in the Russia mess he’s made. Top lawyers with at least four major law firms rebuffed White House overtures to represent Trump in the Russia investigations. “The concerns were, ‘The guy won’t pay and he won’t listen,’” said one lawyer close to the White House who is familiar with some of the discussions between the firms and the administration, as well as deliberations within the firms themselves. Here Rachel Maddow reviews Donald Trump’s history of not paying his debts and notes how that is a contributing factor as he is reportedly facing rejection from outside law firms as he seeks to bolster his defense in the face of mounting scandals.
On June 12th 2017 The Washington Post reported that attorneys general for the District of Columbia and the state of Maryland sued President Trump, alleging that he has violated anti-corruption clauses in the Constitution by accepting millions in payments and benefits from foreign governments since moving into the White House. The lawsuit, the first of its kind brought by government entities, centers on the fact that Trump chose to retain ownership of his company when he became president. Trump said in January that he was shifting his business assets into a trust managed by his sons to eliminate potential conflicts of interests. But D.C. Attorney General Karl A. Racine (D) and Maryland Attorney General Brian E. Frosh (D) say Trump has broken many promises to keep separate his public duties and private business interests. For one, his son Eric Trump has said the president would continue to receive regular updates about his company’s financial health. The lawsuit, a signed copy of which Racine and Frosh provided to The Washington Post on Sunday night, alleges “unprecedented constitutional violations” by Trump. The suit says Trump’s continued ownership of a global business empire has rendered the president “deeply enmeshed with a legion of foreign and domestic government actors” and has undermined the integrity of the US political system. Read the lawsuit here.
Trump made a settlement in one court case but did not even bother to do what he said he was going to do. He was bragging about grabbing women and it was recorded then he lied and said it was just locker room talk and that pissed the women off so then I don’t know how many came forward to tell what he had done to them. One of Trump’s Republican supporters would even have been okay if Trump had used the word rape, On All In with Chris Hayes Thing 1/Thing 2: Republican Congressman Blake Farenthold complained about ‘some female senators from the Northeast’ who are against the GOP health care bill, and said he might challenge one of them to a duel ‘if it was a guy from south Texas.’ Trump has been in more than 4,000 court cases before becoming president, now that’s a crook. Not only is that a crook, that’s at least as much if not more of a crook than Richard “I am not a crook” Nixon ever was. If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, acts like a duck, looks like a duck and smells like a duck then I’m sorry but it’s a damn duck.
Quite frankly I honestly do not know why Trump was not in jail before he even started running for office. But on the August 4th 2017 episode of All In with Chris Hayes in the Red Line segment (unfortunately MSNBC did not put the video clip of the segment online) in an interview with David Cay Johnston, Chris Hayes asks “he never has had any criminal convictions, never been indicted over any sort of financial irregularities and there`s something to be said for living your life in a spotlight that long and not bringing down the law upon you, right?” And David Cay Johnston answers that he once had the Mob’s #2 hit man, Harry, in his house “telling me about the people he killed which the FBI and local cops backed up his stories. And Harry was very proud of the fact that he had never been
arrested for his crimes. Many people who cheat and who swindle and steal as
Donald has done, never get arrested. That`s not a measure of anything.” The full question and answer are below, as well the full interview, and I linked them to the full transcript of the show in case you would like to read the full show.
CHRIS HAYES, ALL IN WITH CHRIS HAYES: Joining me now, Pulitzer Prize Winning Reporter, David Cay Johnston, Founder of DCReport, author of The Making of Donald Trump, someone who spent a lot of time reporting on Donald Trump and his finances in particular. So my question to you is, do you think he has reason to fear Mueller on that score?
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON, DCREPORT FOUNDER: Oh, I think he has tremendous reason to fear Mueller on that score. Remember that Donald`s principal bank is Deutsch Bank. Deutsch Bank has already been fined over $600 million for laundering money for Russian oligarchs. There`s a lawsuit in New York alleging that non authorized a quarter billion dollar tax fraud in which the profit from Trump`s SoHo and Donald owned 18 percent of the profits, ended up in an Icelandic Bank under the thumb of a Russian oligarch. He`s got a lot to worry about.
HAYES: What do you think about the idea of kind of trip wires as they go along? I mean, seems to me that it is going to be the case, they`re going to start to look at the finances and start pulling on threads. And they`re very complex finances, whether their all above board or not, that seems to be one thing that is absolutely established. They`re very complex, right?
JOHNSTON: Yes. But the things that they`re going to be able to show are transfers of money. FinCEN, the organization that does this is mostly IRS people who does this, they are very good at finding a financial needle in the global hay stack of funds that are floating around. And once they uncover a few keys and get some people to cooperate, if there, in fact, were illicit flows of money and money laundering and what amounted to payoffs, they will find those things and remember they`re going to start with people on the outer edge, interview them in front of a Grand Jury, perhaps threaten some them with prosecution if they need to and leverage them as they move towards the center. And Donald is very worried that finally, he has an investigation he can`t compromise or run out the clock on, as he has done with numerous previous investigations of himself.
HAYES: That strikes me as important. You`ve reported on way other times that he`s had investigations looming over him and the steps he`s taken to essentially make sure they didn`t get to him. And it does appear, do you feel like we`re watching history repeat itself?
JOHNSTON: Here, I don`t think he`s going to be able to do what he`s done in the past which is either run out the clock, compromise the investigation, go and rat out other people. In this case, he`s got a team of incredible people going after him. And those 16 lawyers that have gone to work for Bob Mueller, they didn`t leave their million-dollar jobs at big law firms for a two-week job or for a lark. They were persuaded obviously by Mueller. This is important historic work and you need to be on the team.
HAYES: All right, David Cay Johnston, thanks for your time.
JOHNSTON: Thank you.
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.
And there are even more crimes on Trump’s Follow The Money Page and Trump’s Russian Connections Page.
And now that he’s the President his administration is being sued left and right, and travel bans and his many conflicts of interests are just a couple of the problems among many. And Trump kept talking about taking the oil in the Middle East, which is a war crime, so high ranking officials have had to clean up behind Trump. The Secretary of Defense, James Mattis, had to go to those countries and tell them that we are not going to take their oil to try to keep the troops that we have there from being killed. We should have never been in Iraq in the 1st place but I digress. The Middle East is a quagmire; it’s like quicksand, once you get in it’s hard as hell to get out. They have been fighting each other for centuries but haven’t solved anything yet so we have been there for years and we are going to be there for years more. And Nostradamus predicted a 33 year war; if he was correct the Middle East may be it. So it would be helpful if during the time we spend in the Middle East the President of the United States is not sabotaging our military and getting them killed over nonsense and war crimes.
- And Trump is hiring crooks too; several of them could not pass background checks and were escorted out of the Whitehouse. Even Trump’s own wife is a crook; she worked in this country by doing 10 modeling jobs before she had a visa to allow her to work here at all. Since Trump wants to crack down on and deport people who have committed illegal immigration maybe he should have started with his own wife.
And on May 31st 2017 Trump released details of 14 ethics waivers. Trump has granted more ethics waivers in 4 months than Obama did in 8 years. 10 of the 14 waivers publicly disclosed by the White House are undated and unsigned, raising questions about when they were put in place. The Office of Government Ethics plans to press the White House to clarify when it issued a slew of ethics waivers giving its staffers permission to interact with their former employers or clients, an indication that the exemptions might not have been properly granted. Particularly troubling, ethics experts said, was a blanket waiver allowing White House appointees to communicate with media organizations where they previously worked that was described as “retroactive”, a maneuver that the ethics office said was not permitted. “There’s no such thing as a retroactive waiver,” said Walter M. Shaub Jr., director of the ethics office. The exemption appeared aimed at clearing interactions that chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon may have had with Breitbart News, the conservative news site he previously ran. Under an ethics pledge mandated by Trump, Bannon was barred for two years from participating in matters directly related to Breitbart or his other former employers or clients. “Issuing a waiver after the fact won’t fix the problem,” he said. So here is the thing, if you need a retroactive ethics waiver then you have already done something wrong and violated a rule. Trump is not draining any swamp, Trump has done nothing more than add bigger gators to the swamp and made the swamp bigger. So for all you “drain the swamp” people out there, you can forget that.
