When Donald Trump announced his campaign for the presidency and quickly rocketed to the front of the Republican pack, serious conservatives were aghast. And what had them really upset was that Trump was unreliable, not a true conservative who could be trusted to govern according to the iron pillars of their ideology. He had been a Democrat, switched his opinions on core issues like guns and abortion, and obviously neither knew nor cared about policy much at all.
Most conservatives got over it, of course. With a few #NeverTrump exceptions, most everyone on the right rallied around Trump. And now as his presidency is taking shape, we're beginning to see what it's going to be like to have a president who has no beliefs about anything.
I exaggerate slightly; there are some things Trump genuinely believes in. He believes that America is losing, that foreigners are trying to take advantage of us, that no criticism should be brushed off, that women should be judged on their physical attractiveness, and that there's no room that can't be classed up with generous application of gold leaf. [ http://www.idesignarch.com/inside-donald-and-melania-trumps-manhattan-apartment-mansion/ ] But when it comes to policy and his decisions as president, it's all up for grabs.
Consider his recent decision — after months of leading crowds in chants of "Lock her up!" — that there's no reason Hillary Clinton should be prosecuted for her emails (the same conclusion the FBI came to). "I'm not looking to hurt them...it's just not something that I feel very strongly about," he told The New York Times. [ Full Transcript, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/23/us/politics/trump-new-york-times-interview-transcript.html?_r=0 ] Set aside the fact that the president doesn't get to decide who does and doesn't get prosecuted based on how merciful he's feeling. His supporters, whom he spent so much time convincing of Clinton's limitless criminality, might be a bit taken aback.
But that's not all he has changed his mind on. In that interview he backed away from his support of torture — something he repeatedly and forcefully advocated on the campaign trail — because retired Gen. James Mattis, whom he is considering naming as secretary of defense, told him it wasn't useful. "I met with him at length and I asked him that question. I said, what do you think of waterboarding? He said — I was surprised — he said, 'I've never found it to be useful.' He said, 'I've always found, give me a pack of cigarettes and a couple of beers and I do better with that than I do with torture.' And I was very impressed by that answer. I was surprised, because he's known as being like the toughest guy."
So after spending months talking about how important it is that we start torturing prisoners again, all it took was one conversation with a former general to turn him around. He's also suggested he might stick to the Paris climate accord, which he had previously promised to walk away from. It seems that anything might be on the table, depending on who Trump talked to on a given day.
Political scientists have found that despite what most people think, presidents keep the overwhelming majority of the promises they make during the campaign, and when they don't, it's usually because they tried and failed, like Barack Obama not being able to overcome Republican resistance to closing the prison at Guantanamo. They're constrained by their history and their commitments, both to people and ideas. But on this score as on so many others, Trump looks to be unique.
That isn't to say that conservatives really have a great deal to worry about with him. He'll appoint the judges they tell him to, and most of the policy work will be done by Congress anyway: they'll send him bills and he'll sign them, without bothering too much about what they contain (Trump, who has a notoriously short attention span and has apparently not read an entire book since he was a child, isn't exactly going to be poring over policy briefs). [ https://newrepublic.com/minutes/133566/donald-trump-doesnt-read-books ]
But there's a deep irony at work. Trump was the ultimate anti-politician. He had never held office or even run for office before, talked in ways that were unlike any politician, and heaped contempt on Washington and the supposedly corrupt establishment one finds there. Yet he is coming to embody the caricature so many voters have of how politicians act.
In that caricature, the politician tells you what he thinks you want to hear, and then does something different. He doesn't care about the little guy. He's a complete phony. He's only out for himself, trying to get rich off of public office. And he has an inordinate concern for his hair.
Donald Trump is all those things, to an utterly unprecedented degree. He may not sound like a politician, but he takes the worst things people believe about politicians and cranks them up to 11. And in doing so, he's accomplishing something extraordinary: making ordinary politicians look good by comparison.
The Trump conflicts of interest we can see are just the tip of the iceberg
The true possibility of corruption is essentially unlimited.
Updated by Matthew Yglesias - @mattyglesiasmatt@vox.com - Nov 29, 2016, 8:10am EST
For all the stunning revelations we’ve seen about Donald Trump and his global business interests since the election, the larger and more troubling issue is what we don’t know.]
But the most important line in the piece by far is an observation that’s not directly tied to any of that excellent reporting from around the world: “The true extent of Mr. Trump’s global financial entanglements is unclear, since he has refused to release his tax returns and has not made public a list of his lenders.”
To put it even more plainly: We have absolutely no idea what Trump owns, who his business partners are, who is paying him, or whom he owes money to. Trump’s main line of business in recent years has been licensing the Trump name to various developments, so there is a certain obvious connection between the various buildings in various cities named Trump Tower and the Trump Organization. In general, Trump likes to name things after himself, so as a rule, “if Trump is involved, the thing will be named Trump” has been a pretty good guideline. But obviously Trump is not actually legally required to name everything he’s involved with after himself.
And thanks to his failure to do any kind of meaningful financial transparency, the basic reality is we’re not really sure what he owns and we won’t be sure how his family’s investment portfolio shifts over the years. The truly scary thing, in other words, isn’t the conflicts of interest we can see. It’s all the conflicts — and, conceivably, bribes, insider trading, and other illicit activity — that we can’t see.
Trump’s financial disclosures tell us very little
[...]
The possibilities for corruption are essentially limitless
[...]
Conflicts of interest entirely permeate Trump as a regulator
Forget Paul Manafort – these are the men cooperating with the FBI who Trump should be really afraid of
"Potential Conflicts Around the Globe for Trump, the Businessman President"
Felix Sater is likely to be centre-stage if Trump’s downfall comes from his Russian monetary connections. Born Felix Sheferovsky in Russia, he is one of the most colourful characters in the Trump chronicles
Kim Sengupta Tuesday 31 October 2017 15:20 GMT
Donald Trump has seen three of his former campaign aids indicted AFP
The news that Paul Manafort has been charged with a dozen serious offences in Robert Mueller’s Russian inquiry was not entirely unexpected, although it is a very significant development in the case being built against Donald Trump. What came as quite a surprise was the revelation that George Papadopoulos has pleaded guilty to the charges facing him.
George who? Even dedicated Trump watchers may ask. But Papadopoulos, who was part of the Trump foreign policy team, has information which fills in some crucial blanks and provides links to others being scrutinised by special counsel Robert Mueller as he seeks to establish whether Trump really was the “Muscovite Candidate” in the election.
The other reason why Papadopoulos, a Greek American who had once lived in London, is important is because he is evidently providing information to the investigators – a “proactive cooperator” as they put it. He is not, however, the only one doing this. Rinat Akmetshin, a Russian-American lobbyist who was present at a meeting between a Russian lawyer; Donald Trump Jr; President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner; and Paul Manafort, has also now appeared before a grand jury.
And then there is Felix Sater, a key to Trump’s alleged Russian money train. A criminal with connections to Russian and American organised crime, a man who has already been a federal informant in the past is now once again helping the authorities. Sater is believed to be providing information about a money laundering operation based in the former Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan which involved Trump properties.
So it is the fear of disclosure by the men with the secrets which will worry Trump and some people around him. It is hardly a secret that Mueller’s team would like “turn” Manafort, who faces a lengthy prison sentence and a massive fine if he is convicted of the various charges of money laundering, secret lobbying for a foreign power, lying to government investigators and sundry other matters.
Trump’s allies are already expressing their trepidation about this. Roger Stone, who helped launch the President’s election campaign and remains a close confidante, and is also former business partner of Manafort, complained last night: “Now I understand how this works, you try to find something Paul Manafort did 15 years ago and you call it money laundering, tax evasion, wire fraud – some nonsense. Then you say ‘Ok Manafort, we’re sending you to jail for 15 years unless you just admit that you were colluding with the Russians and Donald Trump knew everything.”
VIDEO: 0:22 Ivana Trump: Donald didn't know how to talk to the children until they were adults
We already know some of the things that Trump was aware of and, in the ensuing weeks and months, we shall find out more. Among the things both Papadopoulos and Manafort knew was that the Kremlin claimed to have dirt on Hillary Clinton. Papadopoulos had been told this by an academic in London and a Russian woman who, he thought, was Vladimir Putin’s niece. Papadopoulos had sent emails to the Trump election team about this while urging meetings with the Russians.
Manafort, Trump Jr and Kushner met the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya in June 2016 at the Trump Tower hotel in New York because, it is claimed, she was offering to impart information Moscow supposedly had on Clinton. President Trump is then said to have personally dictated a statement in his son’s name saying the meeting “primarily discussed a programme about the adoption of Russian children” (adoption of Russian children by Americans was banned by Moscow in response to the Magnitsky Act in 2012). That statement by the President has become a key factor into whether he and those around him attempted to obstruct the investigation into Russian meddling in the US election.
Rinat Akhmetshin gave evidence under oath before a grand jury convened by Mueller for several hours on 11th June this year about, among other things, the Trump Tower meeting where he was taken by Veselnitskaya. Akhmetshin, a lobbyist, has acknowledged serving as a counter-intelligence officer in the Soviet military in the past. He is now, he said in a newspaper interview, “a mercenary”, but not a Russian spy and does not work for the Kremlin. “I spend other peoples’ money to achieve other peoples’ goals” was the way he explained his work. The Senate Judiciary Committee is investigating Akhmetshin’s US citizenship, his military background and whether he improperly lobbied for Russian interests.
VIDEO: 0:22 Woody Harrelson recalls dinner with Donald Trump: 'It was brutal'
And then we come to Felix Sater who is likely to be centre-stage if Trump’s downfall comes from his Russian monetary connections. Born Felix Sheferovsky in Russia he is one of the most colourful characters in the Trump chronicles: someone once jailed for stabbing a man in the face with a cocktail glass (for a margarita) and who later avoided a possible 20-year sentence and $5m (£3.8m) fine by becoming a federal informer in another case, that of fraud and extortion by the mafia targeting the elderly, some of them Holocaust survivors.
In a recently unsealed transcript of a hearing in New York, the Justice Department described the value of Sater’s snitching. He had supplied information, it said, on Russian organised crime; American mafia families and al-Qaeda. Sater does not deny working for the government, but he says he did not inform on the mafia.
Sater became managing director of the Bayrock Group, a real estate firm which had offices two floors beneath the Trump Organisation’s headquarters in Trump Tower for eight years. Bayrock went into partnership with Trump in connection with the construction of the Trump SoHo hotel. The two men appeared at ribbon cutting ceremonies for joint projects and went on business trips, including one to Moscow, together. Sater used Trump Organisation business cards, though the Trump Organisation maintains he was not an employee.
Sater boasted that he was so close to the Trump family that he was asked by Donald to squire Donald Jr and Ivanka on a trip to Moscow and that during it he arranged for Ivanka to sit in Putin’s chair in the President’s office in the Kremlin. Ivanka acknowledges the trip took place and it may have involved sitting at Putin’s desk.
Sater is a lifelong friend of Michael Cohen, Trump’s lawyer and a former vice-president of the Trump Organisation. Sater was convinced that Putin would help Trump to get to the White House and he and Cohen would receive the credit due for this. “Can you believe two guys from Brooklyn are going to elect a president?” was the email sent to Cohen at one stage. He had stated, in earlier messages, that Putin would back the development of a Trump Tower hotel in Moscow and that this would be part of a grand plan. “Our boy can become President of the USA and we can engineer it … I will get Putin on this programme and we will get Trump elected.”
Cohen was named in the Trump report by former MI6 officer Christopher Steele as a key conduit between with the Russians through Putin’s spokesman Dmitri Peskov who was allegedly tasked with carrying out a covert campaign to undermine Hilary Clinton’s presidential bid (which Peskov denied). Cohen had initially denied having “any dealings” whatsoever with the Russians in his work for Trump. But newly leaked emails show that he asked for Peskov’s help with a Trump real estate project in Moscow in 2016 when Trump was already campaigning to secure the Republican nomination for the presidency, thus raising issues of conflicts of interest.
Andrew Weissmann, the prosecutor who “turned” Sater after the mafia extortion case and signed his plea bargaining deal is now in the Mueller team, one of many experienced lawyers who had left highly-paid jobs or taken leave of absence, to join the investigation.
Sater has agreed to help a federal inquiry into alleged money laundering by Viktor Khrapunov, Kazakhstan’s former energy minister and the former mayor of the city of Almaty who was charged by Kazakh authorities with abuse of power. He is on the Interpol wanted list at the behest of Kazakh authorities. Khrapunov’s family allegedly used shell companies to buy Trump SoHo properties worth an estimated $3.1m. It is not known if any or how much of the supposedly laundered money went to Trump.
Any relevant information from the Kazakh inquiry about Donald Trump is expected to be sent to Robert Mueller. We have to wait to see whether Felix Sater, whose previous “cooperation runs a gamut that is seldom seen” according to the Justice Department has more to reveal about the US President – the man he had helped, as he had once excitedly claimed, to get to the White House.
THE DEAL TRUMP WANTED WITH RUSSIA [...] It was possible, when The Post first broke the news of the failed deal, to discount the proposal as braggadocio from Felix Sater, the Russian-born real estate developer pushing the deal. “Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it,” Sater emailed Trump Organization executive vice president Michael Cohen, detailed by the New York Times. But as it turned out, this was more than Sater freelancing in Trump’s name. The Post next reported that Cohen emailed Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov in January 2016 in a bid to save the languishing deal; that Cohen discussed the project with Trump on three occasions; and that the effort was dropped when Russian government permission was unforthcoming. The Trump Organization not only pursued this opportunity in secret, it — indeed, Trump himself — actively misled the public. Imagine how much more sharply people would have responded to Trump’s already repulsive praise of Russian President Vladimir Putin during that time — “He’s running his country, and at least he’s a leader, you know, unlike what we have in this country” — if they knew that Trump had just signed a letter of intent with a Russian firm to develop a Trump-branded tower in Moscow. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=134343386
Trump’s Russia Scandal May Be Reaching a Breaking Point The scandal continues to engulf the White House. [...] Perhaps the biggest of the bunch: On August 27, the Washington Post reported that Trump was actively pursuing a deal to build a “massive” Trump Tower in Moscow while campaigning for the presidency. And the New York Times exposed a series of emails between Trump’s business associate Felix Sater and his lawyer Michael Cohen, in which Sater boasted about how the Moscow deal could help Trump win the White House. “Our boy can become president of the USA,” Sater wrote, “and we can engineer it.” .. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=134297466
Is Fraud Part of the Trump Organization’s Business Model?
"Potential Conflicts Around the Globe for Trump, the Businessman President"
A new investigation shows a pattern in different projects around the country and the world.
By Adam Davidson October 17, 2018
Donald, Ivanka, and Donald Trump, Jr., promote a Panama real-estate project at an event in New York in 2006. Photograph by Orjan F. Ellingvag / Dagbladet / Corbis / Getty
What, exactly, is Donald Trump .. https://www.newyorker.com/tag/donald-trump ’s business? The Trump Organization is unusual in that it doesn’t appear to do the same thing for very long. It was a builder of apartments for the lower middle class, then a builder of luxury buildings and hotels, then a casino company, and, most recently, a brand-licensing firm, selling its name to anybody who wanted “TRUMP” emblazoned on a building, bottled water, or whatever else. These are wildly different businesses. The way a company raises money, plans projects, and gains profit are entirely different in each of these fields. Middle-class housing, for example, is typically a slow, steady business in which profits come from careful cost control; luxury housing, by contrast, is riskier, with bigger and faster rewards but a higher chance of failure. One hires different sorts of accountants and salespeople and construction managers. Casinos are something else entirely, and licensing is entirely different from any of those other businesses.
It is becoming increasingly clear that, in the language of business schools, the Trump Organization’s core competency is in profiting from misrepresentation and deceit and, potentially, fraud. There are many ways to make money in real estate. The normal way is to identify a need in the market, raise money by convincing lenders or investors that your plan is sound, build the structure, then either profit through ongoing rent or by selling units. The key variables in such a business are what is known as product-market fit—the accuracy with which a developer understands the housing or commercial needs of a place—and the ability to execute well by keeping costs down without sacrificing the right level of quality. Perhaps more than anything, practitioners of a successful real-estate business obsessively focus on maintaining the ability to borrow money cheaply. The profit on many real-estate projects often comes down to simple math: the cheaper you can borrow money to build, the more money you make. The more trustworthy you are, through a long period of successful projects, the less interest banks will demand on their loans, so the more profit you can make, and the more successful you will be.
Rather famously, Trump overinvested in luxury housing, spent too much on his casinos, and completely blew his brief foray into a regional airline. Far worse, Trump did the very opposite of insuring a long record of fiscal prudence that would allow him to borrow money cheaply. Despite the company’s mixed record, it has survived and grown. It’s doing something well, so what is it?
This month, two incredible investigative stories have given us an opportunity to lift the hood of the Trump Organization, look inside, and begin to understand what the business of this unusual company actually is. It is not a happy picture. The Times published a remarkable report .. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/02/us/politics/donald-trump-tax-schemes-fred-trump.html , on October 2nd, that showed that much of the profit the Trump Organization made came not from successful real-estate investment but from defrauding state and federal governments through tax fraud. This week, ProPublica and WNYC co-published a stunning story .. https://features.propublica.org/trump-inc-podcast/trump-family-business-panama-city-khafif/ .. and a “Trump, Inc .. https://www.wnycstudios.org/shows/trumpinc .” podcast that can be seen as the international companion to the Times piece. They show that many of the Trump Organization’s international deals also bore the hallmarks of financial fraud, including money laundering, deceptive borrowing, outright lying to investors, and other potential crimes.
The reporters—Heather Vogell and Peter Elkind of ProPublica, and Andrea Bernstein and Meg Cramer of WNYC—identified a similar pattern that occurred in deals around the world. The basic scheme worked like this: some local developer in Panama, the Dominican Republic, Florida, Canada, or some other location pays Trump, up front, for the use of his name and agrees to pay him a cut of every sale—not only of units but of things like hotel-room minibar items or, even, bathrobes. These projects typically require sixty per cent or more of units to be sold before construction gets under way. The same set of problems occurred in multiple projects. Many of the early units would be sold to shadow buyers—hidden behind shell companies. Donald Trump or, often, Ivanka Trump would deceive future investors by telling them that a much higher percentage of units had been sold than was factual. More investors pour money in, getting enough money into the project, often, to begin construction. Eventually, the project fails and goes bankrupt. Many of those investors lose all of their money. But the Trumps do not. They got paid up front and are paid continuously throughout until the day the project collapses. They are paid for their name and for overseeing the project, and, if the building is opened, the Trumps manage the property day to day, in exchange for hefty fees.
In the Panama City project, Trump licensed his name for an initial fee of a million dollars, ProPublica and WNYC reported. Trump was also paid a portion of apartment-unit sales and minibar fees. Whether the project succeeded or failed, he was paid as well. A final accounting is startling: the project went bankrupt, had a fifty-per-cent default rate, and the Trump Organization was expelled from managing the hotel, yet Donald Trump walked away with between thirty million and fifty-five million dollars.
The same pattern emerged in other projects. In Fort Lauderdale, Trump announced that a hotel-condominium project was “pretty much sold out” in April, 2006, according to a broker who attended the presentation. In reality, sixty-two per cent of units were sold as of July, 2006, according to bank records that emerged in a court case. The project entered foreclosure, and Trump’s name was removed before construction was completed. In Toronto, Ivanka referred to the property as “virtually sold out” in a 2009 interview. In fact, 24.8 per cent of units had sold, according to a 2016 bankruptcy filing by the developers. The project was built but went bankrupt, and Trump’s name was removed from it. In New York, Ivanka told reporters in 2008 that sixty per cent of units had sold in the Trump SoHo. A Trump partner’s affidavit revealed that only fifteen per cent had been sold at the time. The building was constructed, but the project went bankrupt, and Trump’s name was removed from it.
The Trump Organization did not respond to a long list of questions about its transactions from ProPublica and WNYC. The White House did not have a comment.
Video From The New Yorker The Cohen Hearing in Three Minutes
Many people lose in these schemes. Often a bank loses money that it has lent, or, alternatively, individual investors who bought bonds to support the project lose their money. The people who put a down payment on units often lose their down payments. When the whole thing collapsed, the Trumps, in many cases, stopped claiming—as they had during the rising period—that they were co-owners and developers of the project and began to state they were mere licensees who had no active involvement in the business. This is often untrue, as lawsuits have revealed that the Trumps were intimately involved with every aspect of construction and sales.
It is hard to understand why developers would, again and again, pay the Trumps an unusually large amount of money up front and then a significant share of profits just for their name, especially when their track record of success is so low. One explanation could be that everyone involved is bad at business. The Trumps, their partners, the banks, and others involved simply don’t do proper due diligence, don’t think through the potential risks of a project, and aren’t dissuaded by Trump’s long record of failure. Another explanation, though, is that they are good at a different business. They are not in the real-estate industry. Perhaps, the evidence suggests, some of Trump’s partners are in the money-laundering and financial-fraud industries.
Real estate has long been associated with some types of fraud. Large projects are perfect for a wide variety of schemes. There is an opportunity for fraud in exaggerating the rate of sales. The price one pays for a unit in a new building is affected by how many units were sold earlier, because a well-sold building is worth more than a less well-sold one. How much the developer has put in of its own money is an opportunity to mislead buyers as well. If a developer doesn’t invest in a project that it’s in charge of, it can suggest that it’s not as great as the developer is saying. The Trumps repeatedly lied about these two factors, ProPublica and WNYC found, telling potential investors that far more units had been sold than really were and saying that they had invested much of their own money in the projects. This increases the amount people paid and disguises the very real risks people were taking with their investments.
What is the Trump Organization? What is it good at? Where do its profits come from? It is becoming increasingly clear that much of the company’s business may have come from fraud. Daniel Braun, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney who specialized in fraud cases, told the reporters on the story, “You're describing the basic elements of a long-running and significant scheme to defraud investors. So is that the sort of thing that the F.B.I. and the Justice Department pay attention to? It is. It has a number of kinds of ingredients that you would typically see in an investigation or even prosecution of fraud.”
Adam Davidson is a staff writer at The New Yorker.Read more »
Stunning Report: Trump Organization’s Secretive Global Financial Web Threatens National Security Trump’s global deals would make it impossible for him to conduct foreign policy. He would be "most conflicted" president ever. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=125162833
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