You should look into Trump’s history of dealing with Russian money for your answer:
FOR DONALD TRUMP, there was the purchase of the $12.6 million Scottish estate and the $79.7 million for golf courses in the United Kingdom, not to mention the $16.2 million for the Northern Virginia Winery. All in cash.
For Michael Cohen, it was the lucrative day in 2014 when he sold four Manhattan buildings for $32 million—three times what he’d paid for them less than three years before.
The subtext of many of the recent tales—from Donald Trump’s massive cash-spending spree to Cohen’s $32 million flip of New York real estate—is that the atypical transactions are worthy of greater scrutiny. After all, why was the self-proclaimed “King of Debt” suddenly waist-deep in cash and on a spending spree in the midst of the global real estate crash? Where was Cohen’s money coming from—and where was it going?
In 2016 The Wall Street Journal 's Jean Eaglesham, Mark Maremont, and Lisa Schwartz outlined a specific example of just that sort of structure: “Donald Trump owns a helicopter in Scotland. To be more precise, he has a revocable trust that owns 99 percent of a Delaware limited liability company that owns 99 percent of another Delaware LLC that owns a Scottish limited company that owns another Scottish company that owns the 26-year-old Sikorsky S-76B helicopter, emblazoned with a red ‘TRUMP’ on the side of its fuselage.” All told, the Journal reported, 15 entities were used at that point to “own” Trump’s fleet of two airplanes and three helicopters.
That so many of the transactions and behaviors of the Trump business empire and Michael Cohen’s empire appear to hew so closely to the well-known patterns and stages of money laundering deeply troubles Sharma.
“It falls into fact patterns that we’ve seen in other areas of Russian and Eastern European organized crime,” he says. “We’re staring at a government—that goes right to the top—that engages in very way of doing business and the exact same fact patterns that we set these tools up to combat. That’s mind-boggling to me.”
Trump and Russian money started with Bayrock a long time ago, I remember reading some in-depth stuff on that development and the sheer number of Russian owners pouring through it:
But it was mainly an act, D’Antonio told Foreign Policy. In truth Trump was all but finished as a major real-estate developer, in the eyes of many in the business, and that’s because the U.S. banking industry was pretty much finished with him. By the early 1990s he had burned through his portion of his father Fred’s fortune with a series of reckless business decisions. Two of his businesses had declared bankruptcy, the Trump Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City and the Plaza Hotel in New York, and the money pit that was the Trump Shuttle went out of business in 1992. Trump companies would ultimately declare Chapter 11 bankruptcy two more times. When would-be borrowers repeatedly file for protection from their creditors, they become poison to most major lenders and, according to financial experts interviewed for this story, such was Trump’s reputation in the U.S. financial industry at that juncture.
But Trump eventually made a comeback, and according to several sources with knowledge of Trump’s business, foreign money played a large role in reviving his fortunes, in particular investment by wealthy people from Russia and the former Soviet republics. This conclusion is buttressed by a growing body of evidence amassed by news organizations, as well as what is reportedly being investigated by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the Southern District of New York. It is a conclusion that even Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., has appeared to confirm, saying in 2008—after the Trump Organization was prospering again—that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.”
Trump’s former longtime architect, Alan Lapidus, echoed this view in an interview with FP this month. Lapidus said that based on what he knew from the internal workings of the organization , in the aftermath of Trump’s earlier financial troubles “he could not get anybody in the United States to lend him anything. It was all coming out of Russia. His involvement with Russia was deeper than he’s acknowledged.”
According to Trump’s former real-estate partner and other sources who are familiar with the internal workings of the Trump Organization, his post-’90s revival may have really begun in the early 2000s with the Bayrock Group, which rented offices two floors down from Trump’s in Trump Tower. Bayrock was run by two investors who would help to change Trump’s trajectory: Tevfik Arif, a Kazakhstan-born former Soviet official who drew on seemingly bottomless sources of money from the former Soviet republic; and Felix Sater, a Russian-born businessman who had pleaded guilty in the 1990s to a huge stock-fraud scheme involving the Russian mafia.
“Russian efforts either to recruit somebody as an asset or effectively coerce them into becoming an asset historically typically rely on compromise of either a financial nature or a sexual nature,” said David Kris, a former assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s National Security Division. “Or some other nature by which they can gain leverage. Either induce somebody voluntarily to cooperate or blackmail them.” Kris added that “there is long history of that kind of activity, including in the context of presidential elections,” going back to Soviet efforts to offer money to Hubert Humphrey in the 1968 election.
You won’t hear me saying that stuff. I’m the one trying to convince liberal friends that Trump’s an impotent has-been and there’s not much to fear there. The idea of Trump being a fascist dictator is laughable. Now, he might wish he could be a Duterte, but he has the misfortune of running America, not the Philippines.
Looking at the past three and a half years, it’s clear to me that American democracy and institutions have passed this test. 2018 was proof enough: I’m sure Trump and the GOP would have loved to keep the House, but ultimately, the people had the power and the people spoke.
And yes, in 2016 they spoke, too. I may disagree with the Electoral College, but it’s the system we’ve got and unless it’s changed through the mechanisms that exist to change it (Constitutional amendment, unless I’m mistaken), then it’s the system we’ve got to play by.
I don’t adhere to the view that democracy is some utopian ideal that is designed to generate perfect leaders, rather, it’s killer feature is merely that it gives the people the power to get rid of bad leaders.
And this November they’ve got that power. We’ll see if they want to use it, or give our favorite little carnival barker another 4 years to play kleptocrat.
Four more years of Trump certainly won’t be the “end of America” or any other such nonsense. It’ll just be another precious 4 years lost on climate policy, plus another bunch of messes for Democrats to come in and clean up when it’s over. As they always do.
Several journalists noted that nobody had reported on the “mini-strokes” Trump referenced in his tweet. “So the president is denying something that no one has actually reported – that he had a series of mini-strokes,” tweetedNew York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, who clarified, “At least, no actual reporter has reported.”
This. It’s all laughable because of this possibility, particularly in view of how childish Tramp is. It’s like your kid, unprompted loudly proclaims “I didn’t break the window in the kitchen!” before you even realize there is a broken window.
It’s laughable also because Trump cannot claim some kind of moral high ground by accusing people of spreading rumors because the biggest spreader of false rumors simply cannot do this. And to drive the point home, Trump does this in a tweet in reaction to this rumor:
“Never happened to THIS candidate — FAKE NEWS. Perhaps they are referring to another candidate from another Party!” he wrote, alluding to his frequent claims that Biden’s mental acuity is somehow lacking.
That is, he spreads a false rumor. Such a man-child.
“The New York Times reported in May that Trump does not read written intelligence reports, but does look at visuals such as graphs, charts, tables, and satellite images.”
So, the thing on the left that looks like a slice of pizza is called India …
Might he not be referring to the fact we are on the tail end of summer and moving into autumn, which is cooler than summer and will continue to move into winter which is cooler than autumn?
Rumors are already circulating. Also some rural folks are setting up armed militias to stop people at gun point to protect their communities from the imagined far left extremist looters. Even some law enforcement officers contributed to the misinformation. Things are getting really weird.
They were talking about climate change not seasonal weather pattern. You know that, come on. Maybe he doesn’t want to cause panic. That would make more sense.
