Jared Kushner

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Re: Jared Kushner

Postby The Consul » Tue Jul 18, 2017 4:04 pm

They're not. Don't give a rat's ass. Putin suspended American adoptions of Russians in reaction to the sanctions related to Magnitsky. That Diaper Donnie even admitted they talked about adoption is amazing, it is the same. Russian was trying easy political glad hand opening with adoption. If what Diaper Donnie says is true, she was feeling him up. If he abruptly ended the meeting because adoption - wha? Then it was no big deal to her. She got what she wanted. A. she found out Jr. is an idiot (easily played) and B Trumpco wasn't afraid to cross the line (having both Manafort & Kushner there, duh!)

More to come. More fireworks. Vegas odds! White House Soaps. America making itself great again! Nukes? Why have 'em if'n you don't use 'em! So glad it's Mandella day. I like Mandellas, my wife has one tattoed on her...heh heh, guess! And you thought I was going to say he played in the outfield with the Cubbies alongside Fred Douglass! Gimme a break. Everybody knows Douglass was traded.
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Re: Jared Kushner

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Jul 19, 2017 8:39 am

^^^^^ cross the line


Could Trump Jr., Kushner, or Manafort Be Charged Under the Espionage Act?

If the meeting at Trump Tower feels to you like treason, that's probably because it may actually be espionage.
18 HOURS AGO
CATEGORIES: LAWFARE
Michel Paradis
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The current focal point of the Russia scandal is the confab at Trump Tower, an Apalachin meeting of sorts in which at least eight agents of the Trump campaign and the Russian government met to discuss the Russia’s opposition research on the Clintons. The Russians apparently offered this information in exchange for the Trump campaign’s willingness to hear them out on the Magnitsky Act. Donald Trump Jr. has protested that nothing ever came of this.

Over the weekend, however, the Associated Press reported on an interview it conducted with one of the Russians at the meeting. Rinat Akhmetshin, a Russian-American lobbyist and former Soviet military officer, claimed that the Russian lawyer who ran the meeting, Natalya Veselnitskaya, not only promised to give the Trump campaign dirt on the Clintons, but actually presented her interlocutors with “a plastic folder with printed-out documents that detailed what she believed was the flow of illicit funds to the Democrats.”

Apparently, Trump Jr. was unimpressed with the contents of the plastic folder and asked Veselnitskaya whether she had more concrete evidence. The plastic folder, therefore, may have just contained propaganda. Whether Trump Jr. took the plastic folder with him or whether he left it behind in the conference room is unclear. What was clear, however, was the intent. According to the AP report, “Veselnitskaya presented the contents of the documents to Trump Jr. and suggested that making the information public could help the campaign.” And receiving this plastic folder, assuming it really happened, may have implicated the participants in espionage.

The word “treason” has been thrown around to describe this and other putative efforts by members of the Trump campaign to court and be courted by the Russian government during the 2016 election. For reasons that have been described here, here, and here, nothing anyone in the Trump campaign did or conceivably could have done would meet the constitutional definition of treason. (Even being a vice presidential candidate does not make you a constitutional law scholar.)

In the alternative, Bob Bauer and Jed Shugerman have written superb technical posts explaining how Trump Jr., Jared Kusher, Trump’s senior advisor and son-in-law, and Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager at the time, likely violated campaign finance laws. Helen Klein Murillo and Susan Hennessey made a very clear case for their liability as accomplices under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. On Saturday, Seth Abramson wrote a Twitter thread arguing that they violated 18 U.S.C. § 3, as accessories after the fact to any number of crimes the Russians may have been committing. And Kushner could also have violated 18 U.S.C. § 1001 by withholding information about this meeting on his security clearance forms.

But all of these legal theories, even if they prove to have merit, seem to miss the intuitive point that those who levy treason allegations seem to be making. When considered in terms of what the Russia scandal might actually involve — Americans courting an adversarial foreign power for the purpose of influencing the outcome of a presidential election — these crimes, though felonies, seem like technicalities. What makes things like the meeting at Trump Tower troubling is not simply that members of the president’s inner circle violated federal laws in order to compromise the integrity of the electoral process. It is that they appear to have compromised the integrity of the electoral process in a way that was disloyal to the country. They made themselves fellow travelers of a foreign power that is openly hostile to America and its liberal values, even if not an enemy of the United States in the technical, constitutional sense.

At the risk of resurrecting yet another obscure part of the U.S. code, I would argue that the national security concerns that prompt right-thinking people to reach for the word treason in these circumstances have a place. But that place is not the crime of treason. It is the admittedly problematic Espionage Act of 1917. And as innocuous as it may have seemed in the moment, Veselnitskaya’s plastic folder may have led Trump Jr. across a serious legal line.

We tend now to think of espionage as synonymous with spying, as providing information to a foreign power or leaking state secrets. But espionage, as it was understood in the Espionage Act, is a broader and a more reciprocal legal concept. The Congress enacting the Espionage Act was as, if not more, concerned with U.S. nationals acting covertly to facilitate a foreign power’s infiltration of the political system. And a key provision of that aspect of the law remains codified at 18 U.S.C. § 957.

Section 957 provides:

Whoever, in aid of any foreign government, knowingly and willfully possesses or controls any property or papers used or designed or intended for use in violating any penal statute, or any of the rights or obligations of the United States under any treaty or the law of nations, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.
Section 957 was first enacted under slightly different terms as § 22 of Title XI of the Espionage Act. Title XI’s overriding purpose was to broaden the federal government’s authority to seek search warrants for national security purposes and to seize foreign political propaganda, in particular. The crime was rarely charged, though in one high-profile case during World War I, the filmmaker Robert Goldstein was sentenced to ten years in prison for releasing a movie, The Spirit of ’76, that depicted British soldiers committing atrocities during the Revolutionary War. This movie, it was determined, was made “in the aid of the German Government” and combined with the Espionage Act’s various anti-sedition provisions, was sufficient to sustain his conviction under § 957.

Prior to the Supreme Court’s decision in Lamont v. Postmaster, § 957 was used less as a criminal charge and more as a basis on which the Post Office could interdict communist propaganda being passed through the mails. In 1938, with the passage of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, 52 Stat. 631 (1938), the Postmaster General gained broad discretion to seize foreign propaganda on the theory that the sender’s failure to register with the State Department constituted a violation of the criminal laws, making the receipt of what was mailed a crime under § 957 and the propaganda itself seizable as criminal property. In the lead up to World War II, then-Attorney General Robert Jackson specifically endorsed this daisy-chain use of the law.

Given its overriding use in combination with the Foreign Agents Registration Act, § 957 was included among the other “foreign relations” crimes, such as the newly famous Logan Act, when it was incorporated into the U.S. Code in 1948. Since that time, there appears to have been only one contested prosecution under § 957. In 1989, an American supporter of the Provisional Irish Republican Army was charged, among other things, with developing bomb-making plans. As a “body of insurgents within a country with which the United States is at peace,” the Provisional Irish Republican Army constituted a “foreign government” for the purposes of Title 18 and the bomb-maker was convicted. Alan Dershowitz brought an unsuccessful appeal against his conviction under § 957 on First Amendment grounds, but the First Circuit rejected the contention that the law was unconstitutionally overbroad.

In thinking about what transpired in Trump Tower, § 957 would seem to fit the known or reasonably suspected facts. Trump Jr.’s emails confirm that Natalia Veselnitskaya was known to be an agent of the Russian government. It appears based on the current reporting that neither Veselnitskaya nor any of her confederates were registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which in the context of their explicit efforts to lobby against the Magnitsky Act, may have violated various penal statutes. And if Trump Jr. or one of the other American participants in the meeting took the final and crucial step of actually taking the plastic folder, he would have taken possession and control of papers that were the ostensible quid pro quo for his willingness to be lobbied about the Magnitsky Act. Even if the documents inside the plastic folder contained nothing but unsubstantiated rumors and even if he then threw it in the trash after he left the meeting, he still might have violated the Espionage Act. And even if the plastic folder was rejected as a “nothingburger,” the American participants in this meeting might still be liable for attempting or conspiring to violate the Espionage Act.

Isn’t this just another technicality though? What is the big deal if he took a handout at a meeting? And isn’t the century old Espionage Act rather dubious to begin with? In some respects, the answer to all three of those questions is yes. The First Amendment and overbreadth problems with the Espionage Act are significant, and it is unclear how the current Supreme Court, with its robust free speech jurisprudence, would evaluate them.

That said, the willingness to take the plastic folder is not as innocuous as it might first appear. The plastic folder is precisely the kind of “paper or property” that Congress had in mind when it passed §957. Espionage, like treason, is a crime of loyalty, and the evil it attempts to thwart is the covert insinuation of a foreign power’s interest into the American political process. Even if the contents of the plastic folder were “vague, ambiguous and made no sense,” Trump Jr. would still have accepted propaganda from an unregistered foreign agent. Propaganda marked “foreign propaganda” bears a truth in advertising. And for that reason, it is presumptively less effective at swaying public opinion than information that comes from an ostensibly loyal source, such as a Presidential campaign. In the 1980s, the Supreme Court sustained this truth-in-advertising rationale for the labeling of foreign political propaganda, though reasonable First Amendment minds can disagree. And the original intent of this part of the Espionage Act was to prevent foreign governments from disseminating propaganda through American cutouts.

The willingness to “knowingly and willfully possess or control” the plastic folder also speaks to something deeper. It is one thing to “aid a foreign power,” even a foreign power that is adversarial and intent on violating the law. Doing so may violate political norms, but probably not laws. It is another thing to have something tangible in your hands.

The act of possession serves the same purpose in the Espionage Act as the overt act requirement does in the conspiracy statute. It is a clear line that can be identifiably crossed. It prevents the law from sweeping too broadly, from prosecuting mere inchoate desires that are untethered to an identifiable criminal act. It is not espionage to be favorably disposed to a foreign power. Nor is it espionage to welcome the assistance a foreign power may independently provide. It is espionage, however, to do a hand-off.

Will the facts ultimately show that Trump Jr., Kushner, or Manafort could be charged under the Espionage Act? Would such a conviction be sustained against a First Amendment challenge? There is no way to know. And while the reporting thus far has been damning, that may be a consequence of the sources on which journalists have been forced to rely. It is quite possible that innocent explanations could come to light. But if the confab at Trump Tower feels to you like treason, that is probably because it may actually be espionage.
http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/07/18/cou ... e-act/amp/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Jared Kushner

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Jul 19, 2017 10:38 pm

SeanSpicer's Mic‏
@Spicerlies

SCOOP/
Senate Judiciary letter to @DonaldJTrumpJr
they PUT him on notice...look at what they are asking for. Oh. My.God. It's delish


Image

Image


Bisty CS Ross‏ @BistyCSRoss 2h2 hours ago

OMG Look at all these Russian Collusion names ties to Donald Jr
No Wonder #Trump having a shit tonight on NYTimes threatens #Mueller

Image

records from Ritz Carlton Moscow - I'm on the fucking floor :P :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Jared Kushner

Postby Iamwhomiam » Thu Jul 20, 2017 8:42 am

^^^ "Those I'll provide, but they're mostly illegible. Clumsy Melania accidentally spilled her glass of white wine all over my notes and that's why the ink ran, making them very hard, if not impossible to read. I remember that incident with the wine very well."
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Re: Jared Kushner

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Jul 20, 2017 9:42 pm

This thread is turning into All My Children thread

Senate threatens to send U.S. Marshals after Donald Trump Jr.
By Bill Palmer
Updated: 7:34 pm EDT Thu Jul 20, 2017 | 0

After Donald Trump Jr. publicly expressed his willingness to testify before Congress about his role in his father’s Russia scandal, the Senate Judiciary Committee promptly called his bluff by putting him on the schedule for this upcoming Wednesday. That prompted legal experts including former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara and Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe to express skepticism on Twitter as to whether Trump Jr. would show up. But the Senate has now issued a definitive response to that scenario.

Chuck Grassley, the Republican Chairman of the committee, has largely been going along with the Russia investigation as per the wishes of the Democrats on his commitee. In the case of Donald Trump Jr. and Paul Manafort, who are both scheduled to testify on the same day, Grassley didn’t mince words. “We sent the letter, I don’t know whether they’ve accepted,” he said. “There will be a subpoena if they don’t come” (source: CNN). He then went on to spell out that if necessary, he’ll send the U.S. Marshals after them with subpoenas.

There is little reason to expect that Paul Manafort won’t show, as he’s a seasoned and clever political veteran who’s likely looking forward to the opportunity to face off with Congress in his own defense. But Donald Trump Jr. is neither seasoned nor clever, and will probably screw up and incriminate himself and/or his father on live national television.

So in that sense Junior has no real motivation in his own right to show up and testify. Except now he’s facing the specter of U.S. Marshals hunting him down if he does fail to show up. And if he ends up being subpoenaed but still refuses to honor it, the Senate has legal grounds to have him arrested for contempt of Congress. In other words, he’ll show up to testify on Wednesday.
http://www.palmerreport.com/politics/se ... p-jr/3965/



THE SHOE FITS?

Trump-Russia Scandal Now Threatens to Ensnare Ivanka

To work in the White House, the first daughter had to list all of her family’s foreign contacts. Lawmakers want to know if she was any more forthcoming than her husband was.


SPENCER ACKERMAN
07.19.17 4:46 PM ET
Filling out a standard federal security-clearance application took up three days of Don Beyer’s life.
It was a long weekend in 2008. Beyer, a former lieutenant governor of Virginia, was preparing to spend 11 weeks at the Department of Commerce on behalf of Barack Obama’s transition team.
To do that, Beyer needed to fill out a boring document known as an SF-86 – a document that now has senior White House adviser, and Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner in serious trouble. And to do that, Beyer had to get his immediate family to rack their brains to recall all their foreign contacts over the past seven years– something that now threatens to ensnare Ivanka Trump, another senior White House adviser, the president’s daughter and Kushner’s wife.
It was a lot of work, Beyer recalls. He had a substantial number of foreign interactions, dating back to his origins as an Army brat, born in Trieste when it was still a free territory on the Adriatic. To get his SF-86 completed accurately, he had to canvas his wife, his sisters, his brother and his father for every foreign contact they had in the recent past.
“I think they were all a little fascinated,” said Beyer, who went on to be Obama’s ambassador to Switzerland before getting elected to Congress in 2014 as a Democrat representing the northern Virginia suburbs of DC. The disclosure form ended up being 99 pages long.
Were it not for that experience, Beyer and his staff might not have grasped that Kushner’s SF-86 problems were also an issue for Ivanka Trump. While Beyer has no evidence Trump had dissembled about her own foreign contacts on her SF-86, he wrote on Wednesday to the FBI requesting them to review what she disclosed about those of her husband and brother, Donald Trump Jr.
“What I do suspect is that if he wasn’t disclosing, then it probably never lit up that she needed to disclose also. But the law is pretty clear. We have no reason to think she didn’t describe her own [foreign contacts], unless this is a family habit,” Beyer told The Daily Beast.

Last week, the New York Times revealed that Donald Jr and Kushner met in June 2016 at Trump Tower with a bevy of government-connected Russian contacts. They include Kremlin-allied attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya; Rinat Akhmetshin, a former Soviet military intelligence officer accused of spearheading a hacking enterprise; and Ike Kaveladze, whom federal investigators accuse of laundering over a billion dollars worth of Russian money.
The meeting’s purpose, according to the British music publicist who set it up, was to provide the Trump campaign with dirt on Hillary Clinton from Russia’s chief prosecutor, as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”
It turns out that Kushner disclosed that meeting – belatedly. After the Times reported in April that Kushner had left off two other contacts with Russian agents, the ambassador Sergei Kislyak and the FSB-tied head of a state-owned bank, the first son-in-law quietly updated his SF-86 to include over 100 interactions with foreign officials.
“Forgetting one or two or three – you know, people amend FEC reports and financial disclosures, yeah, they do that all the time, and that’s OK,” Beyer said. “Forgetting everything seems more than a little unusual. And having to have three corrections before he finally gets everything, again pretty unusual.”

Beyer’s history with the near-proctological clearance form got him and his staff figuring that a review of Ivanka Trump’s form would determine if she engaged in what the letter termed “similar deception.” She’s legally obligated to disclose Don Jr. and Jared’s foreign contacts. If she didn’t, it would raise questions about whether she knew about those meetings; if she did, it would raise questions about why Jared didn’t.
When asked a series of questions regarding this story, a White House official responded to The Daily Beast simply by saying, “the White House has a longstanding policy of not commenting on security clearances or other personnel security matters.” Kushner’s legal team did not immediately respond to a request for comment, either.
Beyer began circulating his FBI letter to House colleagues late last week. Ultimately 21 other Democrats signed on. No Republicans did, though Beyer said he sent the text to all 241 of them.
Mike Conaway, the Texas GOPer who is now co-helming the House intelligence committee’s Trump-Russia inquiry, wouldn’t talk about whether the FBI ought to review Ivanka Trump’s SF-86.
“Well again, I’m not going to talk about what my investigation is, other than just to answer the questions that, you know, what did the Russians do or not do, what’d the Trump team do or not do—that kind of stuff,” Conaway told The Daily Beast on Wednesday.
Beyer has yet to hear back from the FBI. The FBI declined comment to The Daily Beast, as did Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s representatives.
“I don’t think it’s life or death for the future of the republic,” Beyer said of his pressure on Ivanka Trump’s SF-86.
“But I do think it’s potentially part of a pattern of ignoring both the spirit and the letter of the law. And it certainly gets into the incredible entanglements that the Trump family has, which makes it difficult to govern independently of all their financial entanglements across many different countries.”
http://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-russ ... are-ivanka



Robert Mueller is going after Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump for financial crimes
By Bill Palmer
Updated: 10:10 pm EDT Thu Jul 20, 2017 | 0

Now we know why Donald Trump’s children began making a concerted effort this week to get Donald Trump to pardon them and resign. And now we know why Trump has begun inquiring as to whether he can legally get away with those pardons. Special Counsel Robert Mueller is now going after Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump for their business dealings with convicted Russian mafia figure Felix Sater, dealings which allegedly involve serious financial crimes.

Bloomberg made the following reveal today: “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.” (link). This doesn’t come as a huge surprise, but it does explain a lot of what we’re now seeing transpire regarding Trump’s kids.

The Trump Organization’s business dealings with Trump SoHo and Sater were not entirely spearheaded by Donald Trump himself. Instead, based on longstanding accounts, it was Ivanka and Donald Jr. who led those business deals; they had the longtime relationship with Sater. As has also long been widely reported, Sater has previously been convicted for financial crimes involving the Russian mafia, and somewhere along the way he’s worked as an FBI informant. Sater also recently agreed to cooperate with the Feds on the Trump SoHo investigation. So when Trump threatened to fire Mueller last night if he investigates his finances, it was because he’s afraid his own kids will be taken down.

As I wrote yesterday, it had become clear that Donald Trump’s kids have been recently trying to steer him toward pardoning them and then resigning (link). And sure enough, today the Washington Post revealed that Trump is indeed inquiring about whether he can pardon himself and his kids. As I’ve explained elsewhere, if Trump tries to pardon himself and his family, he’s finished (link).

http://www.palmerreport.com/politics/ro ... imes/3970/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Jared Kushner

Postby Cordelia » Mon Jul 24, 2017 10:38 am

He and entourage arriving for congressional testimony.....


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOTr-ly3sXA
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Re: Jared Kushner

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Jul 24, 2017 8:43 pm

Report: Kushner Made Deal With Firm Cited In Russia Money-Laundering Case

Carolyn Kaster/AP
By ALLEGRA KIRKLAND Published JULY 24, 2017 4:25 PM

Hours before Jared Kushner stepped out to a podium in front of the White House on Monday and said he has never “relied on Russian funds” for his businesses, The Guardian reported that he made a deal with a real estate mogul linked to a Russian firm accused in a multimillion-dollar money laundering scheme.

The President’s son-in-law and senior adviser paid $295 million in 2015 to acquire several floors of a Manhattan office tower from the U.S. branch of a company owned by the Soviet-born Israeli businessman Lev Leviev. Kushner entered into an agreement with Leviev’s Africa Israel Investments (AFI) to purchase the floors of the old New York Times building.

According to the Guardian, AFI was cited as a business partner of Russian-owned real estate company Prevezon Holdings in a lawsuit alleging that Prevezon laundered millions of dollars through Manhattan real estate. Kushner and Leviev did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment.

A month before Election Day, Kushner also took out a $285 million loan from Deutsche Bank as part of a refinancing package for that some property—a transaction now under scrutiny by federal investigators looking into both Kushner and the President’s finances.

Kushner stated both in written testimony submitted to Congress and on camera Monday that he has “not relied on Russian funds” to support his family real estate company or other business interests.

A link between Prevezon and the Trump campaign came to light via a recently uncovered June 2016 meeting that had been billed to Donald Trump Jr., the President’s eldest son, as an opportunity to obtain damaging information about Hillary Clinton as part of a Russian government effort to help his father’s campaign. Kushner attended the meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and Russian lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin, both of whom worked for Prevezon’s owner, Denis Katsyv.

Prevezon was accused of trying to use Manhattan properties to launder money stolen from the Russian treasury. Whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky uncovered the alleged scheme, and subsequently died in a Moscow prison under mysterious circumstances. Akhmetshin and Veselnitskaya have lobbied heavily on Katsyv’s behalf against the U.S. sanctions bill that carries Magnitsky’s name, as TPM previously reported. They have also pushed for the reinstatement of a program that allowed U.S. citizens to adopt Russian children, which was abolished by Russian President Vladimir Putin in response to the Magnitsky Act.

Kushner said in his written statement that he knew nothing of the June meeting’s purpose or participants ahead of time, and that he skipped out early after deciding it was a “waste of time.” His attendance at the meeting as well as his business dealings are among the areas of interest of federal and congressional investigators probing Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

The U.S. settled its case against Prevezon and associated companies in May for a scant $6 million.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/ ... state-deal





SWISS LEAKS: MURKY CASH SHELTERED BY BANK SECRECY



Diamond Dealers in Deep Trouble as Bank Documents Shine Light on Secret Ways
Diamonds
Photo: Shutterstock
By Ryan Chittum February 9, 2015, 8:00 am
KEY FINDINGS

HSBC Private Bank (Suisse) continued to offer services to clients who had been unfavorably named by the United Nations, in court documents and in the media as connected to arms trafficking, blood diamonds and bribery.
HSBC served those close to discredited regimes such as that of former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, former Tunisian president Ben Ali and current Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad.
Clients who held HSBC bank accounts in Switzerland include former and current politicians from Britain, Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Kenya, Romania, India, Liechtenstein, Mexico, Lebanon, Tunisia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Paraguay, Djibouti, Senegal, Philippines and Algeria.
The bank repeatedly reassured clients that it would not disclose details of accounts to national authorities, even if evidence suggested that the accounts were undeclared to tax authorities in the client’s home country. Bank employees also discussed with clients a range of measures that would ultimately allow clients to avoid paying taxes in their home countries. This included holding accounts in the name of offshore companies to avoid the European Savings Directive, a 2005 Europe-wide rule aimed at tackling tax evasion through the exchange of bank information.

Swiss Leaks is a collaborative investigation that exposes how the Swiss branch of one of the world’s biggest banks, HSBC, profited from doing business with tax dodgers and criminals around the world.

Belgium, center of the world diamond trade, charges HSBC’s Swiss Private Bank with fraud; many dealers under investigation around the world

In the spring of 2005, Erez Daleyot, a Belgian-Israeli diamond tycoon with some dubious connections, paid a visit to his Swiss bankers at HSBC Private Bank, where he would soon have up to $38.5 million in accounts tied to shell companies in the British Virgin Islands.

Business was good. With $886 million reported in revenue the previous year, Daleyot informed his bankers that he projected topping that amount in the year ahead with $1 billion. He’d recently obtained a tax ruling from Israel allowing him to pay just 5 percent in taxes on $85 million in earnings. Visiting Geneva to buy a $41.5 million private jet, he invited his bankers to the airport to show it off, according to secret HSBC files obtained by the French newspaper Le Monde and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

Now Daleyot is reportedly under investigation by Belgian authorities for money laundering and tax evasion, though he has not been charged. And the New York-based diamond firm Lazare Kaplan International, a former business partner, alleges that Daleyot participated in a criminal conspiracy to defraud it of $135 million by laundering diamond proceeds, largely through his HSBC accounts, which were also the source of $20 million in bribes paid to bankers at Antwerp Diamond Bank, according to a civil lawsuit filed by Lazare in U.S. federal court in 2011.

Daleyot’s relationship with HSBC was hardly unique for a diamond industry tycoon. Analysis of the Swiss bank’s files shows that it eagerly accommodated almost 2,000 diamond professionals, looking past unsavory associates, criminal investigations and the dismal reputation of the diamond industry generally.

Diamond trade and HSBC
Diamond dealerA legal dealer weighing diamonds in Koidu, Sierra Leone. Photo: APThe diamond trade, whose world center is Antwerp, Belgium’s largest city, retains vestiges of ancient ways of commerce that make it highly susceptible to black market activity. Secretive, clannish, it still often operates on cash and a handshake.

“Diamonds are a great way to launder money, to hide money, to evade taxes, and all the rest,” said Ian Smillie, a cofounder of the Kimberley Process, a United Nations effort to stamp out what are often called blood diamonds or conflict diamonds — gems that are exploited to finance wars. “Half a million died in the Angolan civil war,” Smillie said of wars fueled by blood diamonds. “Tens of thousands died in Sierra Leone, Congo, and elsewhere. It was a huge humanitarian crisis that destabilized huge regions.”

As a compact, stable, and transferable store of value, diamonds offer enormous advantages to smugglers, money launderers, and tax evaders. In many ways they are better even than cash. Easier to carry and to conceal, they are, in the wholesale market, almost as liquid and easily sold anywhere. They leave no paper trail and are virtually impossible to trace. They don’t go bad, can’t be burned up in a fire and aren’t devalued by inflation.

Still, without Swiss bank accounts and various offshore financial operators, money laundering and tax evasion would be much harder to pull off. The diamond trade is extraordinarily lucrative, which is why some banks might look the other way to get a piece of the business. The files obtained by ICIJ and Le Monde show the bankers at HSBC were eager to court diamantaires and to help some of them avoid taxes by shielding their assets.

The secret HSBC files ICIJ has analyzed are based on data originally smuggled away by an HSBC employee-turned-whistleblower and handed over to French authorities in 2008. France has shared the files with other countries, and they are causing legal repercussions around the world. A Belgian prosecutor charged HSBC’s Swiss unit in November with fraud, money laundering, and criminal conspiracy — mostly involving clients in the diamond business — accusing the bank of “knowingly favoring and encouraging fiscal fraud, giving privileged clients access to offshore accounts, particularly in Panama and the [British] Virgin Islands.” HSBC said at the time that it would “cooperate to the fullest extent possible.”

In a statement to ICIJ, HSBC wrote, “We acknowledge and are accountable for past compliance and control failures. We have taken significant steps over the past several years to implement reforms and exit clients who did not meet strict new HSBC standards, including those where we had concerns in relation to tax compliance.”

The bank’s own files show that HSBC ignored frequent warning signs among its array of diamond trade clients while actively helping some set up offshore companies to obscure their business dealings. Amid a flurry of investigations, HSBC decided to shutter its MEDIS group, which included its diamond clients, in the middle of 2013, according to testimony to Belgian authorities by its chief legal officer, David Garrido. “Historically, the MEDIS accounts were disproportionately more often the subjects of requests from Swiss authorities in relation to criminal charges,” he said. “The bank had lost the confidence of the diamond sector, which represented a risk for the bank. The decision was made to separate from the entire sector.”

Unsavory connections
With Daleyot, the bank looked past his questionable business connections, the most notorious of whom was reportedly Arkadi Gaydamak, a Russian-Israeli businessman convicted in absentia by France for his role in the 1990s “Angolagate” arms-trafficking scandal (some of the charges were overturned on appeal). Daleyot also reportedly financed Yakov Arabov, known to hip-hop stars like 50 Cent and the Notorious B.I.G. as Jacob the Jeweler. Arabov later went to prison in 2008 for lying to U.S. federal agents about laundering money for the Black Mafia Family, a Detroit drug ring. Daleyot did not respond to ICIJ request for comment.

Another HSBC client, Emmanuel Shallop, had earned a mention in a 2001 UN report for doing business with the rebels in Sierra Leone’s vicious civil war. HSBC bankers noted in 2005 that he was “very cautious currently because he is under pressure from the Belgian tax authorities who are investigating his activities in the area of diamond tax fraud.” HSBC continued to serve him. In 2010, a Belgian court convicted Shallop of facilitating the trade of blood diamonds in Sierra Leone, seizing $59 million in diamonds and real estate and sentencing him to six years in prison. “We do not want to give any comment on this issue,” John Maes, Shallop’s attorney, told ICIJ. “My client does not want his name to be mentioned in any article because of reasons of privacy.”

Or take Fisi Daskal, a German-Belgian diamond dealer who in 2005 was about to run into a problem with European tax authorities. “Re: ESD [European Savings Directive] customer confirms that [he] will proceed to open a Panamanian corporation (in 7 days) to solve this problem,” an HSBC banker noted on Daskal’s account. A few months later, HSBC noted that one of his accounts had been blocked, “affected indirectly in a criminal case.” Daskal did not respond to a request for comment.

"[Client] no longer wants us to call him; wiretapping continue[s] in the market … has very concrete plans to leave Antwerp within 6 months"

The European Savings Directive is a law that took effect July 1 of that year. It required EU members and other countries to disclose names of account holders who were EU residents and the interest that they earned to their home countries. Countries with bank secrecy laws, such as Switzerland, were allowed to skip disclosing names and interest earned in return for collecting a withholding tax and remitting it to the to the nation where the client was a resident.

The HSBC files are littered with references to the impending launch of ESD, with bankers discussing with clients ways to set up trusts or corporations in Panama or the British Virgin Islands to shelter their assets from taxes.

The ESD coincided with serious concern in the Belgian diamond community about a crackdown by authorities in the formerly lax country. HSBC’s files noted that Daskal was worried that “the climate in Antwerp remains very hostile. No longer wants us to call him; wiretapping continue[s] in the market … has very concrete plans to leave Antwerp within 6 months. … Confirms that many diamond office[s] are in the same state of mind and construct similar plans.”

Several of HSBC’s diamond clients would indeed soon be leaving Belgium. Among them were Richard Davidovici, Kenneth Lee Akselrod and Mozes Victor Konig, who are fugitives wanted by Interpol for various alleged crimes in Russia, including fraud, smuggling and tax evasion.

Unsavory companies
Then there was Omega Diamonds, a major diamond trading outfit owned in 2006 by Sylvain Goldberg, Robert Liling, and Ehud Arye Laniado. Omega left Belgium after David Renous, a whistleblower who worked for Omega dealing in diamonds from Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo and who claims the FBI prevented two attempts on his life, tipped off authorities in 2006 to an alleged money laundering and tax fraud scheme that Renous said allowed Gaydamak to launder arms money. Tax authorities raided Omega’s offices, seizing $125 million worth of diamonds Belgium suspected Omega had traded unlawfully. While the company eventually reached an agreement to pay a $195 million civil settlement in that case in 2013 without admitting liability, the largest ever involving a Belgian company, there is still an ongoing customs case in Belgium against Omega for an alleged multibillion-dollar import-fraud scheme. Belgium said Omega and several other defendants connected to the alleged scheme owe it an astonishing €4.6 billion.

“The tax dispute between Omega Diamonds and the Belgian tax authorities involved Omega Diamonds only, neither Mr. Laniado, Mr. Goldberg or Mr. Liling were involved in this,” says their law firm, Harbottle & Lewis, in a letter to ICIJ. “The tax settlement does not refer to or constitute any illicit activity on the part of Omega Diamonds and is based on international principles of profit allocation.”

Harbottle says Mr. Renous’s claims were found to be baseless and were dismissed

Sifting for diamonds in CongoSifting for diamonds in a river in Congo. Photo: APThe HSBC files list Goldberg and Liling as beneficial owners of an account under the name of Nybelgo Inc., a Liberian company cited in a 2000 United Nations report for illegal exporting possibly connected to conflict diamonds. The same report lists Omega Diamonds among Belgian companies importing diamonds from Liberia. Harbottle denies Omega had any involvement in blood diamonds. (Two other firms cited in the same UN report – Alcorta Trading and Pier Enterprises SA – are also in the HSBC files, though they are not connected to Goldberg or Liling).

Goldberg and Laniado were also partners in Ascorp, the Angolan diamond monopoly controlled by Russian-Israeli billionaire Lev Leviev, who is a close friend of Vladimir Putin (Leviev had several numbered accounts at HSBC). Among Ascorp’s shareholders, ICIJ reported in 2002, was the Angolan dictator’s daughter, Isabel dos Santos, the richest woman in Africa with nearly $4 billion. Her mother, Tatiana Cergueevna Koukanova Regan, was connected to two numbered accounts at HSBC that contained as much as $4.5 million sometime in 2006/2007. Regan, whose exact role for the accounts is not specified, could not be reached for comment.

Also in the files is Dan Gertler, an Israeli diamond dealer and close friend of Congolese President Joseph Kabila. He reportedly got his big start trading arms for diamonds in African civil wars during the 1990s in violation of UN embargoes. A 2001 UN Security Council report found “very credible sources” who told of a secret deal that, in exchange for a sweetheart deal giving Gertler a monopoly on diamond rights in the Congo, the Israeli “agreed to arrange, through its connections with high-ranking Israeli military officers the delivery of undisclosed quantities of arms as well as training for the Congolese armed forces.”

Mischon de Reya, a London law firm representing Gertler, said in a letter to ICIJ that “our client categorically denies any involvement in the alleged diamonds-for arms trades in Congo in the late 1990s” and that Gertler “has no knowledge of the companies listed in your letter as having these bank accounts.”

“Details of his private affairs are of no legitimate public interest. Our client has, however, always paid all taxes due in every jurisdiction.”

Gertler is listed in the HSBC files as beneficial owner of an account under the name of Concordia Marketing Group Inc., a British Virgin Islands firm. The other beneficial owner of the account was Daniel Steinmetz of the Steinmetz family, one of the biggest HSBC-linked diamond clients of all (Gertler’s lawyers said he is not associated with Daniel Steinmetz). Steinmetz family members appear to have controlled accounts containing nearly half a billion dollars at the bank in 2006/2007. One HSBC banker noted with an exclamation mark that an inactive account belonged to the Daniel Steinmetz group and that the bank expected much new business from him in the next year. He cautioned that the account was “part of DS Group!!!” Another HSBC banker also noted that Daniel’s mother was very ill and that bank officials would travel to Sardinia, where the Steinmetzes lived four months every year, to visit the family.

The bankers were not wrong to be excited. One numbered account called 25225 KT with Daniel Steinmetz listed as attorney would eventually have as much as $264 million at HSBC in 2006/2007.

Wildly lucrative deal
Beny SteinmetzBeny Steinmetz. Photo: YouTubeSteinmetz’s brother Beny offered the prospect of even more business. One of the richest men in Israel and a Gertler business partner, Beny expanded his father’s diamond business into a multi-industry empire. He had major business interests in African warzones, including Angola, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, and in 2008 in Guinea, he made one of the most lucrative deals of all time.

As longtime Guinean dictator Lansana Conté lay dying, he handed Steinmetz half the mining rights to Simandou, the richest iron-ore deposit on earth, wresting it away from the Anglo-Australian giant Rio Tinto. A year later, Steinmetz, who had no experience in iron mining, sold 51 percent of the rights for $2.5 billion. It was almost pure profit. He had paid nothing for the exploration license – in a country whose entire GDP was just $4.5 billion that year – while investing just $160 million in the project.

But a new Guinean government under reformer Alpha Condé suspected that Steinmetz had paid someone for the license to develop Simandou after all – and illicitly. An investigation bankrolled by billionaire George Soros (whose Open Society Foundations help fund ICIJ) and assisted by former British prime minister Tony Blair through his Africa Governance Initiative found that Steinmetz’s Pentler Holdings had bribed one of the late dictator’s wives, Mamadie Touré, giving her millions of dollars and a 5 percent stake in the project in exchange for her help getting Conté to sign over the rights, according to The New Yorker.

Touré insisted on a signed contract, she later testified, and when word of the documents emerged during the Soros-backed Guinean investigation, which would result in a U.S. probe, Steinmetz agent Frederic Cilins then traveled to Florida to pay Touré up to $11 million to destroy the contract and change her story. Touré was wearing a wire for the FBI, which recorded Cilins telling her that he was acting on the authority of Steinmetz himself. Cilins later pleaded guilty to obstructing a federal bribery investigation.

“BSGR and Beny Steinmetz have consistently denied wrong doing in Guinea,” says Theo Crutcher, a Steinmetz spokesman, adding that “BSGR has taken the Government of Guinea to international arbitration at ICSID [International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes] to defend itself against the allegations that have been made against it,” said Theo Crutcher, a Steinmetz spokesman.

Beny Steinmetz and BSG Resources allege that the documents were forged and that Cilins was trying to destroy the forgeries. But Steinmetz is now himself a target of an ongoing U.S. investigation, along with probes in several other countries, including Guinea, and Switzerland, his latest residence. Steinmetz changed his official residence from Israel to Geneva in 2012, while Israeli tax authorities were pursuing an investigation that ultimately determined that he evaded $1.1 billion in taxes.

“Beny Steinmetz is a Swiss resident, pays taxes in strict accordance with his agreement with the Swiss tax authorities and has always managed his bank accounts in Switzerland in full compliance with all applicable laws and regulations,” Crutcher said.

A Pentler Pacific Ltd. appears in the HSBC files. Though it is not connected by HSBC to the Steinmetz group, Pentler Pacific is listed having the same address in the British Virgin Islands as Pentler Holdings, the Steinmetz vehicle that the FBI says bribed Touré.

How the system works
Digging for diamondsWomen in Zimbabwe digging for diamonds. Photo: APBanks like HSBC, as well as the offshore-front industry, are part of an infrastructure that enables the looting of poor countries and the evasion of taxes in rich countries.

“By and large really significant corruption in the resources sector does not involve suitcases of cash,” said Scott Horton, a lecturer at Columbia Law School who investigated the Simandou concessions for the new Guinean government and who wasn't speaking specifically about Steinmetz. “It involves millions of dollars being paid into bank accounts. They may be in Geneva or London or New York. They may be held in the British Virgin Islands or the Caymans. Very, very rarely are they moving money into banks in Guinea or Liberia or Sierra Leone. You cannot pull off this large scale corruption without involving lawyers, accountants, investment advisers in places like Geneva, London, Amsterdam, New York and Paris.”

And Antwerp.

In September 2005, a diamond dealer from war-torn Central African Republic (CAR), one of the poorest countries on Earth, bumped into his new HSBC banker at the Park Lane hotel in Antwerp. Abdoul-Karim Dan Azoumi “was with the minister and the Central African delegations in the hall [or lobby],” noted his banker, and the two exchanged contact information in order to talk later.

Dan-Azoumi’s papers weren’t in order with the bank for an unspecified reason, and the banker told him in phone calls over the next few weeks that he “wasn't comfortable with the current situation,” and that forming an offshore company would solve the issue.

The banker noted that Dan-Azoumi was Muslim and had 18 children by four wives, two of whom he was still married to, and that he directed Badica, a diamond company based in the CAR. Badica would later be fingered by a United Nations Security Council committee for trafficking in blood diamonds. The U.S. State Department noted reports that Badica had financed the Séléka, the Muslim rebel group that overthrew the predominantly Christian CAR government in 2013, setting off a civil war.

The Park Lane hotel itself was co-owned by four of the bank’s clients, including Luscha Baumwald, Louis Stranders, and Josif Grosz. “A family member has court concerns, so we wait to contact,” HSBC noted on Stranders’ account.

Mozes Victor Konig, one of the men now wanted by Interpol, was the fourth co-owner of the Park Lane. Konig had as much as $114 million in his HSBC accounts, one of which was called Front Trading Consultants Inc., during 2006/2007.

The group had used the hotel investment to launder tens of millions in dirty money. All four would be convicted of fraud in 2012. A criminal court in Antwerp forced them to forfeit the $40 million hotel and another $18 million in cash and handed out sentences that ranged from probation to two years in prison.

Neither Konig nor Baumwald, Stranders, Azoumi or Grosz could be reached for comment.

Konig, with Interpol after him, is still at large.



Israeli Diamond Tycoons Listed in Leaked Panama Papers
Diamond and mining magnate Dan Gertler is mentioned more than 200 times in the leaked documents of Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, a leader in establishing shell companies that often serve to conceal the ownership of assets.

Uri Blau and Daniel Dolev Apr 07, 2016 2:15 AM

Dan Gertler in Democratic Republic of the Congo, 2012. Bloomberg
Panama Papers: Hundreds of Israeli companies, shareholders listed in leaked documents detailing offshore holdings
Panama Papers: The prime ministers, presidents and kings who benefited from tax shelters
Panama Papers: Massive tax haven document leak exposes corruption and crime on global scale
The Israeli billionaire Dan Gertler, who made his fortune in diamonds and mining, is mentioned more than 200 times in the Panama Papers.
Gertler is among some 600 Israeli companies and 850 Israeli shareholders listed in the leaked documents of Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, a leader in establishing shell companies that often serve to conceal the ownership of assets.
Gertler is mentioned in connection to a number of companies, and registered as a beneficiary for some of them. Mossack Fonseca’s internal correspondences includes a draft of a contract between Gertler and a company called Callery Resources, seemingly for consultation on a mining deal in Congo.

Haaretz’s investigation has found that this company is controlled by Yitzhak Abuhatzeira, son of millionaire Rabbi David Abuhatzeira and apparently one of Gertler’s closest associates.
The leaked documents also show that the Panama-based law firm had stopped representing Gertler due to alleged investigations into his companies.
In 2011 Gertler was at the center of an extensive correspondence between various figures in Mossack Fonseca. According to the files, the law firm failed to carry out a due diligence examination before registering two Panamanian companies, Burford Commercial S.A. and Norseville Estates S.A. The two companies were registered at an unusual request of a Swiss law firm. Only after registration did Mossack Fonseca find out that the beneficiaries of both companies were “Anat Gertler, her husband Dan and their children.”

After this discovery, the head of the firm’s client department sent an email recommending the firm immediately stop working with these companies and halt cooperation with the Swiss firm that represented them.
“…We discovered that the [beneficial owner] is a Mr. Dan Gertler who is an Israeli diamond dealer under investigation… His name is plastered all over the internet and we have entities of his with our [British Virgin Islands] license that are currently under investigation by the BVI Financial Securities Commission,” the email says.
Another email says Gertler is suspected of bribing Yisrael Beiteinu leader Avigdor Lieberman; a correspondence from 2011 confirms that Mossack Fonseca ceased representing the companies.
Emails sent in 2015 again mention Gertler’s name. They include a draft of a contract between Gertler and a Panamanian company Callery Resources, which was registered by Mossack Fonseca in January of that year.
According to the contract, Callery provided valuable consultation services to Rowny Asset Limited and other companies “associated” with Gertler on mining in Congo’s Katanga Province. The outcome of the consultation was the creation of a company called Mumi, which was jointly owned by Rowny and the mining giant Glencore. Mumi’s holdings in Katanga are estimated to be $1.8 billion. The contract states that Rowny received a dividend from Mumi in the last quarter of 2014.
In the contract, Gertler also undertakes to “recommend” that Rowny to pay Callery $10 million for its services, with further payments if additional dividends are received from Mumi. Callery’s power of attorney is signed by one Yitzhak Abuhatzeira of Ramat Gan, according to the leaked papers.
Yitzhak Abuhatzeira is the son of David Abuhatzeira, formerly Nahariya’s chief rabbi. In 2012 Rabbi Abuhatzeira’s fortune was valued at 750 million shekels by Forbes Magazine and he was listed as Israel’s second wealthiest rabbi. David Abuhatzeira is also the grandson of Rabbi Israel Abuhatzeira, known as the “Baba Sali.”
Although Rabbi Abuhatzeira usually avoids being endorsing with a specific political party, in the last elections he openly supported Shas. The rabbi is known as one of Gertler’s confidants. Three years ago he reportedly spent a weekend in Bnei Brak, where Gertler lives, to take part in the diamond merchant’s son’s bar mitzvah.
Gertler is also reportedly a frequent guest at the Abuhatzeira family’s celebrations.
There is no evidence in the files that the contract draft has been signed or implemented. Gertler refused to answer questions on the matter and Yitzhak Abuhatzeira was unavailable for comment.
Gertler isn’t the only diamond merchant associated with companies that were registered by Mossack Fonseca. Lev Leviev, for example, is named in the files as the owner of Lexinter International Inc., which holds shares in Vauxhall Securities Inc., a company registered in the British Virgin Islands.
The extensive activities of diamond and mining tycoon Beny Steinmetz, his brother Daniel Steinmetz and their business partner Nir Livnat are mentioned in hundreds of Mossack Fonseca documents. Internal correspondences between the law firm and Diacore, part of Steinmetz’s diamond group BSGR, identify Construction Minister Yoav Galant as a confidant of Steinmetz.
In view of this, the law firm requested the company to provide “the pertinent explanations related to the information found.”
Galant’s office said in response that “Galant doesn’t know Daniel Steinmetz, he saw him a few times in social circumstances. Benny Steinmetz has been a friend of Galant’s for many years to this day.”
Gertler responded to the report through lawyer Boaz Ben Zur, saying that "according to an initial examination , the two firms noted in the report are non-active, and were being held as shelf companies (the use of shelf companies is a matter of routine practice in international business). Moreover, my client had no knowledge of the claims raised regarding the [Panamanian firm's decision] to terminate representation [of Gertler for alleged investigations]. In this regard, it should be noted that firms under the trusteeship of the Gertler family do business on a global scale, working with some of the most prominent publically traded firms around the globe. Mr. Gertler's reputation is under constant scrutiny and he has always been found to be unblemished, with his businesses run according to the law and official requirements.
Regarding the draft of the contract, Ben Zur said "the contract was not signed by Mr. Gertler and was never fulfilled, and no money was transferred to Yitzhak Abuhatzeira or any firm acting on his part. Mr. Yitzhak Abuhatzeira was employed in the past (until a year ago) by a foreign consulting firm tied to Mr. Gertler. Mr. Abuhatzeira performed his duties well. It was further reported that Rabbi David Abuhatzeira is Mr. Gertler's rabbi for many years. The ties between them are between a man of faith and his rabbi, and have no connection to his businesses."
Haaretz reached out to Yitzhak Abuhatzeira numerous times in both writing and on the phone but was unable to receive his response.
The leaked files, which were obtained by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and shared by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists with Haaretz and other media organizations, provide a glimpse of the economy that until now had been hidden from the Israeli public.
read more: http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.713130


Diamond Mogul Leviev Buys 50% of Zambian Emerald Mine
June 04, 17 by Albert Robinson

Image

(IDEX Online) – Israeli diamond magnate Lev Leviev has added emeralds to his portfolio after acquiring half of an emerald mine in Zambia. The green stones have reportedly seen a 10-fold rise in price in the last eight years.

The Grizzly emerald mine in Zambia’s Copperbelt province, which borders the Democratic Republic of Congo, has been renamed Gemcanton Investments Holdings, reported Bloomberg, citing Kombadayedu Kapwanga, managing director of Leviev’s Namibian unit.

Leviev used his Israel-based diamond company to purchase half of the emerald mine, Kapwanga said.

The Zambia company registry shows Gemcanton is jointly owned by two companies: British Virgin Islands-based Frango Finance Ltd. and Wolle Mining Limited. Grizzly was previously 85 percent owned by Abdoulaye Ndiaye, according to the Zambia Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative. Grizzly has been digging for emeralds in Zambia since 1997, according to Gemcanton.

Emerald prices have soared by more than tenfold in the past eight years, as top producer Gemfields Plc sought to expand the market for the green stones and boost advertising. Emeralds were previously mainly produced by artisanal miners, meaning there wasn’t a consistent supply enough for retailers to run production lines or advertise them. The company owns the Kagem mine, Zambia’s biggest producer.

Gemfields Chief Executive Officer Ian Harebottle said the company has tried to contact Leviev, but without success.
http://www.idexonline.com/FullArticle?Id=43137


A look at the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) (1)


A look at the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) (2)


A look at the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) (3)


A look at the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) (4)


A look at the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) (5)


A look at the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) (6)
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seemslikeadream » Mon Jun 26, 2017 7:17 am wrote:
Kushner dealings with Deutsche Bank may draw scrutiny from special counsel

White House senior adviser Jared Kushner in the East Room of the White House in Washington. (Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
By Michael Kranish June 25 at 9:04 PM
One month before Election Day, Jared Kushner’s real estate company finalized a $285 million loan as part of a refinancing package for its property near Times Square in Manhattan.

The loan came at a critical moment. Kushner was playing a key role in the presidential campaign of his father-in-law, Donald Trump. The lender, Deutsche Bank, was negotiating to settle a federal mortgage fraud case and charges from New York state regulators that it aided a possible Russian money-laundering scheme. The cases were settled in December and January.

Now, Kushner’s association with Deutsche Bank is among a number of financial matters that could come under focus as his business activities are reviewed by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, who is examining Kushner as part of a broader investigation into possible Russian influence in the election.

The October deal illustrates the extent to which Kushner was balancing roles as a top adviser to Trump and a real estate company executive. After the election, Kushner juggled duties for the Trump transition team and his corporation as he prepared to move to the White House. The Washington Post has reported that investigators are probing Kushner’s separate December meetings with the Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak, and with Russian banker Sergey Gorkov, the head of Vnesheconombank, a state development bank.


The Deutsche Bank loan capped what Kushner Cos. viewed as a triumph: It had purchased four mostly empty retail floors of the former New York Times building in 2015, recruited tenants to fill the space and got the Deutsche Bank loan in a refinancing deal that gave Kushner’s company $74 million more than it paid for the property.


The White House, in response to questions from The Post, said in a statement that Kushner “will recuse from any particular matter involving specific parties in which Deutsche Bank is a party.” Kushner and Deutsche Bank declined to comment.

Deutsche Bank loans to Trump and his family members have come under scrutiny. As Trump’s biggest lender, the bank supplied funds to him when other banks balked at the risk. As of last year, Trump’s companies had about $364 million in outstanding debts to the bank.

Democrats from the House Financial Services Committee wrote on March 10 that they were concerned about the “integrity” of a reported Justice Department investigation into the Russian money-laundering matter “given the President’s ongoing conflicts of interest with Deutsche Bank,” citing “the suspicious ties between President Trump’s inner circle and the Russian government.” The Justice Department did not respond to a question about whether it is following up on the money-laundering settlement that Deutsche Bank reached with New York state regulators in December.


On May 23, the Democratic members asked Deutsche Bank to disclose what it had learned in its internal review about whether Trump may have benefited from the improper Russian money transfers. The bank refused, citing U.S. privacy laws. The Democratic letter also raised the possibility that the bank had conducted a similar review of Kushner — without mentioning his name — by referring to a review of accounts “held by family members, several of whom serve as official advisers to the president.”

The Democrats wrote that it was important to learn more about Deutsche Bank loans to Trump and family members to determine whether they were “in any way connected to Russia.”

The refinancing loan with Deutsche Bank is mentioned in documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission as part of a public offering of ­mortgage-backed securities. It states that Kushner and his brother, Joshua, “will be guarantors” under what was called a “nonrecourse carve-out.” Such guarantees require more than a loan default to kick in. They are commonly known as “bad boy” clauses, a reference to how a lender could seek to hold the guarantor responsible for the debt under circumstances that might include fraud, misapplication of funds or voluntary bankruptcy deemed inappropriate. The terms of the guarantee, which generally are not secured by collateral, are negotiated between lender and borrower.


“The way to look at this is, so long as you’re not a ‘bad boy’ and don’t do anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about,” said James Schwarz, a real estate lawyer who is an expert in such clauses. “To the extent you would do something fraudulent, then you have things to worry about.”

The corporate loan and Kushner’s personal guarantee are not mentioned on his financial disclosure form, filed with the Office of Government Ethics. Blake Roberts, a lawyer who represented Kushner on the matter, said in a statement to The Post that Kushner’s form “does not list the loan guarantee” because the disclosure relied on “published guidance” from OGE that he said “clearly states that filers do not have to disclose as a liability a loan on which they have made a guarantee unless they have a present obligation to repay the loan.”

The Post sent the language cited by Kushner’s lawyer to Don Fox, a former general counsel and acting OGE director. After reviewing the wording, he said in an interview that he would have advised Kushner to disclose the personal guarantee of the $285 million corporate loan because of its size and possible implications.

“If I were still at OGE and somebody came to us with that set of facts, I would say, ‘By all means, disclose it,’ ” he said, referring to “the spirit of the law.”

After being informed of Fox’s statement, Roberts contacted Fox to present his view that no disclosure was required. Fox said in a follow-up email to The Post that even if OGE “advised there was no requirement to disclose,” he would not have argued that point but “I would have nonetheless recommended Jared over report in this instance given the magnitude of the contingency and the public interest in liabilities — actual and potential — to Deutsche Bank.”

Separately, Kushner disclosed that he and his mother have a personal line of credit with Deutsche Bank worth up to $25 million.

The Deutsche Bank deal was one of the last Kushner orchestrated before joining the White House. It is among the dozens of complex transactions that he was involved with during his decade in the real estate business.

Although Kushner divested some properties in an effort to address potential conflicts, he retains an interest in nearly 90 percent of his real estate properties, including the retail portion of the former New York Times headquarters, and holds personal debts and loan guarantees.

The deal that led to the Deutsche Bank loan is rooted in a holiday party held in late 2014 at the Bowlmor bowling alley, which is located in the retail portion.

At the party, Kushner decided that the four retail floors of the building, while rundown, could be transformed into a thriving tourist destination, according to his associates.

The building passed through several owners after the newspaper sold the property for $175 million in 2004 to Tishman Speyer. Tishman sold it three years later for $525 million to a company called Africa-Israel Investments. (Those transactions prompted Trump a few months ago to poke fun at the Times, tweeting that the “dopes” at the newspaper “gave it away.”)

Africa-Israel’s decision to purchase the building was made by its chairman, an Uzbek-born Israeli citizen, Lev Leviev. He is one of the world’s wealthiest men, known as the “King of Diamonds” for his extensive holdings in Africa, Israel and Russia. He was then expanding his real estate holdings in New York City.

Leviev told the New York Times shortly after the building’s purchase that he was a “true friend” of Russian President Vladi­mir Putin, largely through his work with an influential Jewish organization in the former Soviet Union. The newspaper wrote that he kept a photo of Putin in his office in Israel. Leviev’s company said in a statement to The Post that Leviev “does not have a personal relationship” with Putin but has met him “on a few occasions.” Leviev’s statement said he was referring to his belief that “Mr. Putin has been a ‘true friend’ to the Jewish people in Russia.”

In 2008, a year after the building’s purchase, Leviev invited Trump to his Madison Avenue store, an ultra-high-end establishment called Leviev Jewelry, where they were photographed together, according to the Leviev statement. Leviev hoped to work with Trump on Moscow real estate deals, according to an article in Kommersant, a Russian newspaper. The Leviev statement said that the two “never had any business dealings with one another, contrary to speculation.”

Six years later, Kushner saw an opportunity for his own company.

Leviev, whose company was having financial difficulties, according to an Israeli press account, sold the building’s 12-floor office portion for $160 million, a transaction that did not involve the four retail floors.

Leviev’s daughter, Chagit, took charge of her father’s U.S. subsidiary and set out to find a buyer for the retail portion of the building. The company said it would entertain offers no lower than $300 million.

Kushner’s company offered $265 million, which was rejected. Kushner himself then negotiated with Chagit Leviev and others in 2015 and succeeded with a $296 million offer, according to an official involved in the matter.

“It was a very hard back-and-forth New York negotiating style,” said Kushner’s broker, Lon Rubackin. Leviev’s partner in the deal, Five Mile Capital, did not respond to a request for comment.

Few knew it at the time, but the negotiations were nearly consummated when Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, ran into Chagit Leviev on May 4, 2015, at an after-party for a Metropolitan Museum of Art gala — an encounter that was memorialized in a picture posted on Instagram.

“Such a pleasure seeing ­@jaredckushner and his stunningly beautiful wife @ivankatrump last night [at] the #metball­afterparty,” Chagit Leviev wrote.

The deal was signed a week later and closed in October 2015. The Leviev company said in a statement to The Post that Kushner simply made the highest offer and “there was no political element to the transaction.”

Kushner took over a property that was only 25 percent leased, according to a company official. His company recruited tenants, offering some a year’s free rent to lock in long-term contracts, according to an SEC filing. As a result, the building was nearly fully leased, with higher rents, including new tenants such as National Geographic.

The strategy paid off when Kushner’s company went to Deutsche Bank for refinancing. An appraisal cited in SEC filings for the package of mortgage-backed securities placed the value at $470 million, a 59 percent increase in a year. The bank declined to release the appraisal, but a person involved in the deal said that such a rapid increase was unusual when New York real estate was rebounding from recession, and credited Kushner for finding stellar tenants.

In a statement, Kushner Cos. President Laurent Morali said the property’s value increased sharply “for a simple reason: the building’s dramatic turnaround. We had a vision for the property when we purchased it that no one else had, and are proud to say that we executed on it.”

Kushner’s company took out $370 million in new loans in October 2016, giving it $74 million more than the purchase price a year earlier. Along with $285 million from Deutsche Bank, Kushner’s firm received $85 million from SL Green Realty, where Kushner had once worked as an intern. SL Green spokesman Rick Matthews said the deal made sense because the building has been mostly leased, giving it “increased value.”

The Deutsche Bank loan was delivered just before the bank — which has long been under investigation by federal and state authorities — agreed to pay a $7.2 billion U.S. penalty in December for mortgage securities fraud in its packaging of residential mortgages. The bank also paid a $425 million New York state fine in January for failing to properly track large transfers from Russia.

Democrats on the House Financial Services Committee wrote in their March 10 letter that because “press reports indicate” the Justice Department is continuing to investigate the money- laundering case, they are “concerned about the integrity of this criminal probe” in light of Trump’s “ongoing conflicts of interest with Deutsche Bank.” Bloomberg News has reported that the Justice Department has requested records related to money laundering from Deutsche Bank as part of a probe.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national ... a96038ffcf


Africa-Israel’s decision to purchase the building was made by its chairman, an Uzbek-born Israeli citizen, Lev Leviev. He is one of the world’s wealthiest men, known as the “King of Diamonds” for his extensive holdings in Africa, Israel and Russia. He was then expanding his real estate holdings in New York City.

Leviev told the New York Times shortly after the building’s purchase that he was a “true friend” of Russian President Vladi­mir Putin, largely through his work with an influential Jewish organization in the former Soviet Union. The newspaper wrote that he kept a photo of Putin in his office in Israel. Leviev’s company said in a statement to The Post that Leviev “does not have a personal relationship” with Putin but has met him “on a few occasions.” Leviev’s statement said he was referring to his belief that “Mr. Putin has been a ‘true friend’ to the Jewish people in Russia.”


Donald trump and the King of Diamonds Lev Leviev

Image

ZEMBLA - The dubious friends of Donald trump: King of Diamonds

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvd7PqI_Lx0

In the second part of our programme about Donald Trump’s controversial friends, we will set our sights on the Israeli billionaire Lev Leviev, who is controversial because he is suspected of trading in blood diamonds. He is one of the world’s biggest diamond traders and owns prestigious stores in New York and Moscow, but he is also the owner of Siebel, the Netherlands’ biggest jewellery chain. Leviev has ties with Russian president Putin, US president Trump and his son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner. Trump, however, claims he hardly knows this “King of Diamonds” . Zembla investigates Lev Leviev’s business empire.

The Israeli-American diamond cartels involved in Congo are seeking to displace the diamond interests in Angola run by Israel-American Lev Leviev and Maurice Tempelsman, top-level partners of the Angolan state diamond companies.
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=25980&p=300490&hilit=Lev+Leviev#p300490


In another stunning blow to Israeli settlement-builder Lev Leviev, the Israeli business magazine Globes Online has reported that BlackRock Inc., one of the world's largest investment management firms, has divested from Leviev's Africa-Israel Investments. The Globes article follows a similar report by the Norwegian news service Norwatch. The move comes after a nearly two-year-long global boycott campaign of Leviev's businesses that developed in response to the billionaire's construction activities in at least four Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, all of which violate international law, and his abusive labor practices in the diamond industry in Angola and Namibia.
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=19472&p=283902&hilit=Lev+Leviev#p283902


THURSDAY, JULY 24, 2008
Hiding Leviev
The Village of Bil'in in the West Bank in Occupied Palestine is suing two Canadian corporations in Quebec Superior Court for committing war crimes connected with the construction of illegal settlements. The interesting aspect is that the Canadian companies, Green Mount International Inc. and Green Park International Inc., are allegedly fronts, through an elaborate series of holding companies, nominees and trustees, for none other than our old friend Lev Leviev, the guy who sells blood diamonds and uses the proceeds to fund the building of illegal settlements:
http://xymphora.blogspot.com/2008/07/hiding-leviev.html
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Jared Kushner

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Aug 03, 2017 11:11 pm

Kushner Know About Russian Money Laundering, and When Did They Know It?

And why did the Justice Department abruptly settle a criminal case handled by the same Russian attorney who met with Trump officials last year?
By Bob Dreyfuss TODAY 1:49 PM



If Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Russiagate, pulls the right threads, what might unravel is the underside of the tangled financial and real-estate empire owned by Donald Trump, his two sons, his daughter Ivanka, and the person who could be the weakest, most vulnerable link in that chain: Jared Kushner, his son-in-law. All five could face criminal charges—and for President Trump, impeachment proceedings. The first thread to pull on, hard, is the skulduggery surrounding the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower, where Donald Trump Jr., Kushner, and Paul Manafort met with a group of Russians with ties to Russia’s intelligence service, the FSB, and a direct line to Vladimir Putin.

It was at that meeting, of course, that the trio of Trump associates met with a Russian delegation offering to provide the Trump presidential campaign with “official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary,” which the go-between described as “very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

Since then, the Trump family has been scrambling to obscure, deflect, and cover up what actually happened at that meeting, a pattern that could strengthen the case that Trump is engaged in obstruction of justice, a charge that gained momentum when the president fired FBI director James Comey. Subsequently, Trump unfurled a string of attacks against Attorney General Jeff Sessions for recusing himself in the Russiagate investigation because of his still-unexplained meetings with Russia’s ambassador, and against Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who’s overseeing the Mueller inquiry.

Alarmingly, Trump warned Mueller to stay away from his unseemly web of financial and real-estate transactions. In a rambling interview with The New York Times on July 19, Trump was asked if an effort by Mueller to “[look] at your finances and your family finances” would cross the president’s “red line.” Trump answered, “I would say yes,” and he went on to say that the Mueller investigation “is about Russia,” not the Trump family’s money. In that same interview, Trump declined to say whether or not he’d fire Mueller if the president’s finances came under scrutiny.

The Trump and Kushner dynasties are multiply connected to Russian real-estate deals.
But “Russia” and Trump’s “family finances” are inextricably linked—something that Mueller, who has hired a high-powered team of prosecutors and investigators, some with expertise in New York real estate and money laundering, well knows. The Trump and Kushner families, a marriage (via Ivanka) between two of New York’s leading real-estate dynasties, are multiply connected to Russian real-estate deals. “We don’t rely on American banks,” said Eric Trump back in 2014. “We have all the funding we need out of Russia.”

The June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower could well be a smoking gun precisely because it involves both Russiagate—i.e., potential collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence—and Trump’s and Kushner’s ties to a tangled money-laundering scandal involving Russian oligarchs close to Putin.

Perhaps that’s why President Trump overruled his own White House staff and advisers in devising a cover story in regard to Donald Jr.’s role in setting up that meeting. According to a blockbuster report in The Washington Post, the president himself “dictated” the statement later issued by his son that, it turned out, was a lie: namely, that the Trump Tower tête-à-tête was about the adoption of Russian orphans rather than a gambit to seek dirt on Hillary Clinton that came from Russian intelligence and the Russian state prosecutor, a close Putin ally.


“The thing that really strikes me about this is the stupidity of involving the president,” Peter Zeidenberg, a former deputy special prosecutor, told the Post. “They are still treating this like a family-run business and they have a PR problem.… What they don’t seem to understand is this is a criminal investigation involving all of them.”

And at the heart of that criminal investigation is the Trump and Kushner enterprise.

At the center of the story is the Russian lawyer and activist Natalia Veselnitskaya, who led the team that met with Don Jr., Kushner, and Manafort. Veselnitskaya is Russia’s chief advocate in the effort to undo the Magnitsky Act, a painful sanctions regime imposed on dozens of leading Russian officials that was enacted by Congress in 2012 and signed into law by President Obama. The Magnitsky Act is named after Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer who was arrested, tortured, and allegedly killed in custody after he’d uncovered evidence that the Russian government and a shady group of private investors had looted Hermitage Capital Management, whose CEO is William Browder. As part of their investigation, back in the mid-2000s, Magnitsky and Browder learned that the fraudsters had stolen $230 million and had attempted to launder it through US and Western banks and real-estate properties.

At the time of the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting, Preet Bharara, then US Attorney of the Southern District of New York, was deep into prosecuting a criminal case involving some of that laundered money. The target of Bharara’s inquiry was a company called Prevezon Holdings Ltd. “In 2007, a Russian criminal organization engaged in an elaborate tax refund fraud scheme resulting in a fraudulently obtained tax refund of approximately $230 million,” charged the US Attorney’s Office. “Members of the criminal organization…engaged in a broad pattern of money laundering in order to conceal the proceeds.”
https://www.thenation.com/article/what- ... y-know-it/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Jared Kushner

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Aug 14, 2017 9:56 pm

an unnamed foreign country....maybe here's looking at you Jared




Iraeli police detain billionaire Beny Steinmetz

Five people had been held on suspicion of crimes spanning fraud to money laundering

Israeli billionaire Beny Steinmetz detained by police

Mr Steinmetz is best known for his business dealings in the iron ore industry in Guinea

9 HOURS AGO by: John Reed in Jerusalem
Beny Steinmetz, the mining billionaire, was among five men detained by Israeli police for questioning on Monday in connection with an international probe into alleged fraud and money laundering.

The four other people arrested included David Granot, the acting chairman of Bezeq, a leading Israeli telecoms and pay-TV company, and Tal Silberstein, a political consultant who has previously advised former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and Christian Kern, the Austrian chancellor.

Israeli police said the men were detained on suspicion of crimes including fraud, breach of trust, money laundering and forging documents. Mr Kern’s Social Democratic party said it was cutting ties with Mr Silberstein with immediate effect after his arrest.

The police said they had been investigating a number of people on suspicion that they had worked with their “main suspect” — who officers did not name — to produce fictitious contracts and business deals, including a real estate business in an unnamed foreign country, in order to transfer and launder money.

The police added that they were co-operating with law enforcement agencies outside Israel, and that they had carried out searches in suspects’ homes and offices.

Bezeq reported Mr Granot’s detention for questioning in a regulatory filing to the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange and Israel Securities Authority. It said that it had no information about the nature of the investigation, adding that the probe had nothing to do with the company.

Mr Steinmetz, who was previously detained in Israel in relation to a long-running probe into his mining activities in Guinea, appeared in court in Rishon LeZion, central Israel, on Monday. It is not immediately clear if the two investigations are related.

Speaking in court, Mr Steinmetz said Israel was acting like “totalitarian states” and accused the US billionaire George Soros of plotting to bring him down.

Mr Soros’s Open Society Foundations are a funder of Global Witness, a non-governmental organisation that campaigned for investigations into alleged corruption related to Guinea’s Simandou iron ore deposit, where Mr Steinmetz’s mining company was invested.

“We did not do anything,” Mr Steinmetz told the court in remarks quoted widely by Israeli media. “There is nothing here, and there was nothing here.”

The court appearance was in response to a police request to extend the suspects’ detention for questioning. None have been charged.

Mr Steinmetz, the scion of a prominent Israeli diamond family, was arrested in Israel in December on suspicion of bribing officials as part of the sprawling Guinea investigation. He was released on house arrest.

Forbes estimates Mr Steinmetz’s net worth at $1bn. He made his fortune in Africa, and has done business in Congo, Sierra Leone and Nigeria.

The probe relating to Guinea dates back to 2008, when Lansana Conté, then the country’s leader, stripped Rio Tinto of its rights to the northern half of the Simandou deposit. Days before he died in December that year, Conté granted the same rights to BSGR, the mining arm of Mr Steinmetz’s business empire.

Conté’s successor, Alpha Condé, later launched an inquiry into how BSGR came to win its rights to the iron ore prospect and stripped Mr Steinmetz’s company of those rights. BSGR has denied any wrongdoing throughout the investigation.

The company confirmed on Monday that Mr Steinmetz had appeared in court, but said it could not comment until it knew what the allegations behind Mr Steinmetz’s detention were.
https://www.ft.com/content/790a1cf8-80e ... b903247afd
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Jared Kushner

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Aug 29, 2017 4:36 pm

EXILES ON PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE: HOW JARED AND IVANKA WERE REPELLED BY WASHINGTON’S ELITE
“What is off-putting about them,” one political veteran told me, “is they do not grasp their essential irrelevance. They think they are special.”

BY SARAH ELLISON
AUGUST 27, 2017 6:00 PM

I. AIR FORCE ONE
Donald Trump hoped the trip would draw a line under the Russia story, which had hounded his candidacy and was now damaging his presidency. His legislative agenda, including repeal of Obamacare, was already in trouble. Looming just ahead were his reckless rhetoric about North Korea and his reaction to the violence in Charlottesville—outright support for white nationalists. But the Russia story—Russia’s interference in the 2016 elections and the possibility of collusion by the Trump campaign—is one with no legal end point in sight. And when Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump woke up in the Hamburg Marriott Hotel on Saturday, July 8, in Hamburg, Germany, they knew that the story was about to get worse, and that the family’s involvement was about to widen.

The couple had accompanied Trump on his second major international trip as president, the centerpiece of which was a meeting of the G-20, hosted by German chancellor Angela Merkel. Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump are senior advisers to the president and were part of the delegation accompanying him, which included chief economic adviser Gary Cohn, National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and a smattering of West Wing aides. But the 35-year-old Ivanka had a special purpose that day. She was unveiling a $325 million effort she had worked on for months: a World Bank fund, promised to reach $1 billion, to help finance women entrepreneurs in developing countries.

While Jared sat in on a bilateral meeting between Trump and British prime minister Theresa May, Ivanka anchored a panel that included the president of the World Bank, Jim Yong Kim, and the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde. Onstage before a row of international flags, Ivanka, with her placid demeanor and her occasional midsentence smile, talked about the importance of enabling women to achieve “economic independence and financial security.” The pale-pink dress she wore, with bell sleeves and large bows, would be featured, as is nearly everything she wears, on fashion blogs and in the Daily Mail, where readers are beckoned to “get Ivanka’s look!” (for considerably less). Immediately following the panel, Ivanka stood in the front row of world leaders and heads of state to have her picture taken, and then listened to herself be praised by Chancellor Merkel, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, and her father. At one point, President Trump diverged from his praise of her to note, in a rare moment of self-deprecation, or possibly just self-pity, that “if she weren’t my daughter it would be so much easier for her. It might be the only bad thing she has going, if you want to know the truth.”

WATCH: Ivanka Trump, the First Daughter

Two hours later, Trump tried to reward Ivanka, his favorite child, with a small perk. He asked her to briefly take his place at the conference table between Prime Minister May and the Chinese president, Xi Jinping. It’s not abnormal for a delegate to take the seat of a world leader at such an event, as Angela Merkel would later note. But when a conference aide tweeted a photo of Ivanka at the table, Twitter reacted with disdain at the clear nepotism, a response Ivanka must be getting used to. “This is strange,” noted Michael McFaul, the U.S. ambassador to Russia under Barack Obama. “Very strange.” Even among some Trump loyalists, the breach of protocol was too much. “Excuse me,” said one former Trump adviser. “This is not a royal family, and she’s not the princess royal.” (In fact, “princess royal” is a term that some West Wing advisers apply to her, though never to her face.)

Later that day, as they boarded Air Force One to return to Washington, Trump and his closest aides were already grappling, as they had been for 24 hours, with a much bigger problem. The New York Times was about to break a story about a June 2016 meeting that Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka’s older brother, had held in Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer who had ties to the Kremlin. It was the first evidence of any member of the Trump family having contact with Russian officials during the campaign—the implication being that some sort of deal was on offer. Worse: Jared Kushner had attended the meeting. A statement would be needed. Before they had even boarded the plane, Kushner and Ivanka had consulted with his attorneys about a telltale e-mail chain, which had turned up weeks before when Kushner’s legal team reviewed his records in order to respond to congressional investigators. Kushner and Ivanka and their advisers initially advocated for full transparency related to the meeting, in the sense of “reveal everything,” according to someone close to the deliberations. Donald Trump Sr.’s legal team, led at the time by Marc Kasowitz, had advocated engaging with a team of reporters from Circa, who had learned separately about some aspects of the meeting. Kasowitz’s team wanted to present the meeting as a setup by Democratic operatives. But during the G-20, circumstances changed, when Donald Trump Sr.—the president—ignored advice on all sides and decided instead to essentially draft his son’s statement for him, according to two sources familiar with the events.

Kushner, Trump, and their children disembark from Air Force One in West Palm Beach.
Kushner, Trump, and their children disembark from Air Force One in West Palm Beach.
From A.P. Images/REX/Shutterstock.
There are 85 phone lines available on Air Force One, and the scene that followed aboard the president’s plane was described to me as “a frenzy.” For his own statement, Kushner spoke to and e-mailed back and forth with his attorneys, both of them Washington veterans: Jamie Gorelick, of WilmerHale, and Abbe Lowell, of Norton Rose Fulbright. The Kushner statement as it eventually emerged was sparse. It emphasized how busy Kushner had been during the campaign and the transition, noting that he had had “over 100 calls or meetings with representatives of more than 20 countries.” Only later would he give a full explanation for what he had been up to during this period. In written testimony, submitted to the Intelligence Committees of both the House and Senate, he explained that he had been so busy he had mistakenly not included any meetings with foreign persons on his first form, an omission he blamed on a misunderstanding with his assistant; his second two updates were the results of discoveries his lawyers made as they combed through his e-mails. Laura Terrell, a partner at the multi-national law firm DLA Piper, worked in the George W. Bush White House, where she was responsible for assisting high-level officials with security-clearance forms. She told me that it was “unusual” for someone in a senior White House job to have had three updates to his or her security clearance, adding that she could not recall another case in which it had occurred.

Kushner’s lawyers referred the Times’s questions about the meeting itself to Donald Trump Jr., whose personal statement, The Washington Post first reported, had been drafted as much by the president as by Don junior and his advisers, with Hope Hicks, then a press secretary, acting as an intermediary. (Former White House spokesman Sean Spicer, perhaps to his subsequent relief, was relegated to the back of the plane.) President Trump signed off on a statement that suggested the meeting with the Russian lawyer was focused on adoption, nothing more, which was misleading in more ways than one. Adoptions of Russian children by Americans were prohibited by Russian president Putin in retaliation for the Magnitsky Act, a U.S. measure that bans certain Russian officials from entering the U.S. or using its banking system. Moscow would like to see the act undermined or reversed—that was the potential “quid.” The next day, the Times reported that the meeting had been set up on the premise that the Russian lawyer was offering dirt on Hillary Clinton—the potential “quo”—spurring yet another statement from Don junior. Soon after, as the Times prepared to publish the contents of the e-mail chain between Don junior and an intermediary to the Russian lawyer, Don junior released the exchange himself. Had his father not insisted otherwise, he might have released the exchange earlier, sparing himself and his family three days of embarrassing media attention, not to mention the adding of cover-up as a potential target for Robert Mueller, the special counsel in charge of the Russia probe.

In recent conversations, I’ve heard people close to President Trump wonder aloud whether it was Kushner’s team that leaked the Don junior e-mails to the Times in the first place. The implication would be that Kushner was willing to sacrifice his brother-in-law in order to distance himself from the uncomfortable reality of the meeting. There is no evidence for this. But it illustrates the tension among Donald Trump’s advisers. The pressure of the Russia investigation has created rifts among members of the Trump family and their lawyers.

Inside the Trump White House, where advisers are regularly subjected to ritualistic debasement or worse at the president’s hands, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump are the two people who up till now have managed to float above the fray. They have become a feared duo inside the West Wing, as much for an apparent vindictive streak as for their favored status with the man Washington operatives now call “the principal.” No one except for the president is surrounded by a larger battery of legal and public-relations representation. They appear to be driven in equal parts by family loyalty and brand preservation. Ivanka, like her father, relies on her name and image to propel her fortune. Kushner, while less comfortable in the spotlight, has a stable of advisers and staff who report to him as the czar of a shadow government known as the White House Office of American Innovation.

The stark contrast between the hopeful scene at the G-20 meeting and the chaos and panic aboard Air Force One highlights the key facet of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump’s existence in Washington. It is the contrast between the world they want to appear to inhabit and the one they actually do.

To report this story, I spoke to West Wing advisers, personal friends, and various other associates of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump. Surprised to find themselves in Washington to begin with, the couple has undergone a serial transformation. First, they were awestruck by the seeming power of their new positions, and approached Washington as one giant research project, setting up meetings and phone calls with experts in the areas that interested them. It was as if the entirety of Washington’s expertise was laid out in one giant smorgasbord. For Kushner, this approach was a continuation of one he had adopted during the campaign, and one that came with some peril, as he would later discover. When I asked a longtime associate how Jared and Ivanka felt about their time in Washington, the first word uttered was “sacrificial.”

It’s clear that, after an initial period of awe at the sheer power of their positions, Jared and Ivanka have been stung by the vitriol directed at them. But, as Ivanka has been known to tell her six-year-old daughter, Arabella, “for every problem, there is a solution.” For Kushner and Ivanka, the solution has been to fight back: against New York friends who disapprove of them, against West Wing foes, and even against the president himself. Increasingly you hear chatter in Washington that Jared and Ivanka won’t last, not because they are at risk of being pushed out, but because they will save themselves from a damaged White House. One well-connected strategist in New York told me that the two were eyeing a move at the end of the school year in 2018. A person close to the couple said they weren’t planning that far ahead. “When they decide it’s more important to protect their own and their children’s reputations than it is to defend their indefensible father’s, that’s a sign the end is near,” one influential Republican donor told me.

WATCH: Jared Kushner, Adviser to the President

When might that moment come? The president’s abhorrent commentary about the events in Charlottesville, in which he described some of those marching with neo-Nazis as “very fine people” and decried the removal of Confederate statues as “sad to see,” is among the most toxic and racist public statements ever made by an American president. Any masquerade that Kushner and Ivanka could maintain that they were moderating influences in the White House flew out the window the moment Trump waved his hand and said that there were “many sides” to the Charlottesville violence. He did so on a Saturday, and Kushner and Ivanka were observing Shabbat. When she awoke early on Sunday, Ivanka tweeted, “There should be no place in society for racism, white supremacy and neo-nazis.” Kushner was silent about the white-supremacist violence in Charlottesville, where many of the so-called Unite the Right protesters chanted anti-Semitic taunts such as “Jews Will Not Replace Us.” On Tuesday, Trump doubled down on his comments. In doing so, he risked alienating much of the Republican Party and also members of his own administration, including Gary Cohn, his chief economic adviser, who was reportedly disgusted by the comments, as well as his new chief of staff, General John Kelly, who could only look at the floor and shake his head as he listened to the president talk. According to a person familiar with their thinking, the military leaders in the Cabinet have reportedly been made “despondent” by the president’s comments, but feel compelled to stay in place to carry on essential government business, including crafting a strategy to deal with the looming threat of North Korea. But Ivanka has had nothing more to say publicly, not even after a widely viewed Vice News broadcast about the protests in Charlottesville featured a white nationalist who said he faults the president for giving “his daughter to a Jew.”

Kushner and Ivanka will leave the White House at some point. When they do, it will be a welcome development for those who view the pair not merely as Trump’s protectors, as they see themselves to be, but rather as one of his greatest weaknesses. As a former West Wing staffer from a previous administration told me, speaking about Jared and Ivanka, “There’s nothing more obstructive and distracting and unhelpful than to have a bunch of stupid apolitical family members calling all the shots.” The arrival of Kelly as White House chief of staff has introduced an official layer between the couple and the president. People close to Kushner and Ivanka say they welcome his promise of discipline. He has also been useful: Kelly assisted in the ouster of chief strategist Stephen Bannon, leader of the nativist faction in the White House and a longtime Kushner foe. But Kelly’s discipline also challenges the family-business nature of the Trump administration, which favors Kushner and Ivanka above all others.

II. CAUGHT BY SURPRISE
The way Ivanka sums up her current position is by now famous: “I didn’t ask for this.” It’s a statement she has made on television and in conversation with friends, as if the election of her father to the presidency is a kind of disappointment, one for which she cannot be blamed—indeed, as if she had not served as a surrogate throughout the campaign and her husband had not been deeply involved in managing it. Still, Ivanka and Jared seemed to readily embrace their roles as the translators of the Trump presidency to their old elite circles in Manhattan, most of whose members were dismayed by his win. Ivanka was generally the instigator of the couple’s social relationships, often with people far older than they. Kushner and Ivanka used to socialize with the likes of onetime Democratic politician Jim McGreevey, billionaire investor Ron Perelman, and Rupert Murdoch and his ex-wife Wendi Murdoch, with whom Ivanka maintains a friendship.

In the weeks following Trump’s surprise victory, Ivanka and Jared were the favored port of call for activists, executives, and anyone else seeking a voice of reason. The campaign had been defined by the apocalyptic messages of Trump policy adviser Stephen Miller and the race-baiting themes of Steve Bannon, Trump’s final campaign manager and the former C.E.O. of Breitbart. Trump himself, wholly inconsistent and politically ignorant, seemed somehow up for grabs. Some liberals held out the hope that Jared, scion of a prominent Democratic family, and Ivanka, whose family politics amounted to whatever is good for Donald Trump, would together facilitate the elusive “pivot” toward sanity that Establishment Republicans, and everyone else, had been hoping for. During the transition, Ivanka met with Al Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio about climate change. She met with Queen Rania of Jordan to talk about women’s empowerment. She memorably sat in on a meeting with Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, one of the many times the Trump family has flouted the rules and customs of the presidency. She was in the early stages of honing a platform of issues that she hoped would define her time in Washington. Kushner was engaged in his own constant stream of meetings, some of which he would reveal in later statements to Congress. During those heady weeks after the election, Ivanka realized that her previous life—running her own clothing-and-accessories brand and working alongside her brothers in their father’s real-estate company—was gone forever. The decision to move to Washington, where Ivanka and Jared occupy a $5.5 million home in the Kalorama neighborhood, just blocks from the Obamas, was as much driven by Jared’s deep role in the campaign as it was by Ivanka’s determination to remain at her father’s side. Ivanka initially planned to simply move to Washington with her family and work as an advocate for favored causes. But then she saw the potential opportunity to wield more clout.

While their divestments were certified by the Office of Government Ethics, neither of them chose to divest themselves entirely of their corporate assets before moving to Washington, an invitation to perceived conflicts of interest that Kushner himself has been particularly dogged by. Before taking on his official role, he had engaged in discussions with both Chinese and Qatari firms to help refinance the Kushner Companies’ signature building, 666 Fifth Avenue. He also secured a $285 million loan from Deutsche Bank for a separate property as the bank was settling a Russian-money-laundering case with New York regulators. These episodes have invited uncomfortable questions about his motives and his ties to unsavory governments.

A former associate said of the couple, “She was always the one with the personality, the one with a much stronger presence. He was a pretty quiet, soft-spoken, nice guy, and there was a certain formless quality to him.” As noted, Ivanka organized the social schedule. Kushner himself had few friends. Since his father-in-law’s election, he has talked in an interview about “exfoliating” those who are not supportive of his work with the president, perhaps not the most congenial way to talk about people you no longer need or want. He reportedly told one former associate, who had brought up the ugly rhetoric of the campaign Kushner had helped run, that he did not “give a shit” if the associate didn’t want to do business with Kushner anymore.

“I haven’t had anything to do with them since they moved,” said one New York friend, “and it is because the day that man gave an inaugural speech, what am I going to say? ‘What the fuck is wrong with you?’ ” When they lived in New York, Kushner used to remind Ivanka that “we’re in the zoo, but let’s try hard not to be part of the animals.” He often would add, “You want to be watching.” The friend noted that Kushner has traded up into a higher-powered circle: “He is rolling with the prince of Saudi Arabia and not the real-estate guys anymore.” In Washington, the couple regularly dines with Trump Cabinet members. They attended Steven Mnuchin’s wedding and spend many weekends at the Trump National Golf Club, in Bedminster, New Jersey, outside the Washington party circuit. Their close friends the Cordishes, who moved with them to Washington, where Reed Cordish works for Kushner in the West Wing, are a constant.

WATCH: Donald Trump’s Most Sinister Friends

When I read Kushner’s recent written statement to Congress, where he talked about how he had contacted Henry Kissinger for foreign-policy advice, seeking to marshal expertise for his father-in-law, it reminded me of the way Kushner had approached his life as a newspaper owner. After buying The New York Observer for $10 million in 2006, Kushner called Rupert Murdoch and asked him to dinner. They met at the Waverly Inn, and Kushner told Murdoch, according to a former associate, that he wanted to learn from him. “He said, ‘I want to be like you when I grow up,’ and Rupert loved it,” the associate told me. Ivanka was eventually named a trustee for two of the Murdoch daughters, a position she relinquished when her father became president.

Kushner’s seeming deference, a trait he learned when he was forced to take over his father’s real-estate business in his mid-20s, served him well during the campaign. Among Kushner’s major achievements was helping to get Fox News behind Trump. Initially “Rupert hated Trump,” the former associate told me. “He thought he was a fraud.” The two men were a study in contrast. Trump was ostentatious and a loudmouth, while Murdoch was buttoned-down and traditional. Murdoch understandably had little respect for Trump’s business acumen. Murdoch’s dislike of Trump came as no surprise to a different Trump associate I spoke with. Trump’s constituency, this person told me, “was always normal people,” meaning the average guy on the street. “The rich guys always hated him.” But Kushner cultivated Murdoch. It was Kushner who acted as the intermediary in making peace between the Trump campaign and Fox News during the Megyn Kelly feud. Kushner has kept in close touch with Murdoch since the election. The two men, along with John Kelly, joined Trump for a recent dinner, during which Murdoch reportedly urged Trump to fire Bannon. (Bannon left the White House in August.) When a New York Post editorial labeled Don junior an “idiot” and “criminally stupid” for the way he handled the meeting with the Russian lawyer in Trump Tower, some commentators wondered if Murdoch was turning on Trump. In truth, he may have been turning on only one part of the Trump family—and channeling the views of another part.

Ivanka and Jared in a Cabinet meeting at the White House; speaking with German chancellor Angela Merkel and President Donald Trump.

III. REALITY BITES
Thomas Barrack, a real-estate investor and close associate of Donald Trump’s, told me recently, “The best day that everybody has is the day they decide to go to Washington, and the worst day is about four weeks later.” Ivanka and Jared have lasted longer than that. People who have spoken with them say the couple habitually points out that the average tenure of a West Wing aide is 18 months—a tenure they intend to outlast. At the same time, neither has committed to staying the duration of the Trump presidency, which both must realize may well be cut short.

When Ivanka arrived in Washington, she went on a “listening tour” of sorts. Paid family leave was a signature issue for Ivanka during her father’s campaign, and she hoped to continue advocating for it in Washington. (A paid-family-leave proposal is contained in the administration’s recent budget document; The Wall Street Journal has called it “The Ivanka Entitlement.”) But her stated positions were frequently at odds with her father’s policies. Her efforts to bridge the divide have sometimes seemed unsuccessful, and she has often been out of the loop. As Politico has reported, she first got word of her father’s ban on transgender people serving in the military—not something she would have endorsed—the way everyone else did, by reading his peremptory tweet.

Ivanka may be willing to live with the inconsistencies inherent in her relationship with her father, but official Washington shows no such willingness. While Mike Pence was on Capitol Hill laying plans to repeal Obamacare, Ivanka requested a meeting with Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards. She and Jared went to see Richards in February for what Richards called an “explainer” on Planned Parenthood and the issues surrounding the organization. Ivanka went to the meeting thinking she might act as a kind of referee between the Republicans clamoring to de-fund Planned Parenthood and the organization itself. The meeting was cordial, according to a person familiar with it, although Ivanka and Jared did not commit to anything. When the first version of a health-care bill proposed to strip funding from Planned Parenthood, Ivanka’s surrogates reached out to the organization with an idea: stop offering abortions and the White House would advocate increased funding for Planned Parenthood clinics. Richards turned down the proposal. Then those same surrogates tried an end run, going around Richards and contacting Planned Parenthood board members. “It completely backfired,” said someone familiar with the effort. “It wasn’t just naïve from a Planned Parenthood perspective. It was naïve that the Republican House would have accepted it, because it would have meant keeping Planned Parenthood open.” After the failure of this gambit, Richards lashed out at Ivanka at a Women in the World event in New York: “Anyone who works in this White House is responsible for addressing why women are in the crosshairs of basically every single policy that we’ve seen out of this administration,” Richards told the crowd.

Other forays into the work of Washington society have been equally dismal. The couple recently attended an off-the-record dinner at the home of Atlantic Media’s owner, David Bradley, the sort of soirée Bradley holds on a regular basis with newsmakers and prominent Washington reporters and columnists. “They were terrible,” one attendee told me. The couple kept to platitudes and pabulum, as they often do in public conversations. People close to Kushner and Ivanka say that they have come to Washington for a limited time to work, not make inroads into the social scene, much less put down roots.

When Ivanka threw herself into the analysis of the Paris climate accord and the implications of the U.S. pulling out, she talked supportively to Andrew Liveris, chairman and C.E.O. of the Dow Chemical Company, about a letter signed by C.E.O.’s urging her father not to abrogate the deal. The ad ran, but Trump pulled out anyway. When Ivanka later tried to distance herself from her own efforts on climate change, the disavowal hurt her credibility with pro-environment business owners and Silicon Valley executives. To them, the episode showed not only her lack of pull with her father but also an unwillingness to stand on principle. A senior White House official said, in Ivanka’s defense, that “for something that was a campaign promise from the president, these are unrealistic expectations. She can get people into the White House to make their case, and that’s what she did.” Ivanka has tried hard to persuade associates and others that she is focusing on a few issues—job creation and women’s empowerment, including paid family leave, child-care tax credits, workforce development, and STEM education—and should be judged only on the success or failure of these, not on the broader positions of her father’s administration. But if her main value in Washington is her access to her father and she is unable to sway him, then she is simply a 35-year-old former real-estate and retail executive in over her head. Their supporters point out that they are aware of charges of nepotism but also point to their competence in managing real-estate deals and building their own businesses.

Kushner has plunged into an array of issues so broad that it has become a regular source of mockery among comedians and, more importantly, people in official Washington. He not only oversees the Office of American Innovation (whose projects include improving government I.T., improving veterans’ services, infrastructure projects, addressing the opioid epidemic, and developing “workforce of the future” programs) but also has a broad foreign-policy role and serves as a general adviser to his father-in-law.

But outside the White House, a key problem seems to be, as one Washington veteran told me, that Kushner and Ivanka don’t have the necessary self-awareness—don’t understand how to behave when you roll into Washington as the creature of someone else. Most such people take a seat a little off to the side, at least until they get their bearings. “What is off-putting about them is they do not grasp their essential irrelevance,” this veteran told me. “They think they are special.”

Washington’s bureaucratic levers and time-honored operating rules remain a mystery to just about everyone in the administration. Inside this disconnected White House, Ivanka and Jared have consolidated their influence on the level of personnel, even if they have been unable to have much impact on the actual world. Kushner has assembled his own team, including longtime business associate and friend Reed Cordish, whose father owns a real-estate business in Baltimore. Ivanka Trump introduced Cordish to the woman who would become his wife, and the two couples both have young children. Cordish helped out during the transition and has joined Kushner, alongside Chris Liddell, a former Microsoft C.F.O. and William Morris Endeavor executive. (Cordish draws no salary for his White House service; neither does Kushner or Ivanka.) Also involved in the Office of American Innovation are Gary Cohn and deputy national-security adviser Dina Powell, both former Goldman Sachs executives. Aides involved in projects blessed by Jared and Ivanka have special protection inside the White House. “If you are hitched to them, you are untouchable,” said the former Trump adviser.

WATCH: How Long People and Policies Last in the Trump Administration

While Kushner’s own politics are difficult to discern, he seems to excel at waging war against certain colleagues, whom he views as detrimental to his father-in-law. There has been a long-standing divide in the West Wing between Kushner and his “globalists,” on the one hand, and the Steve Bannon faction, which remains in place despite Bannon’s departure, on the other. Kushner supported Anthony Scaramucci as communications director because he was seen as someone who was not only blindly loyal to the president but also able to “break the cartel” of Reince Priebus, as Kushner recently told an associate. Kushner viewed Priebus, who was removed in July, as having a stranglehold on the communications shop, deploying Sean Spicer and his acolytes to combat negative stories about himself.

Ivanka is more practiced in the spotlight than Kushner, though she can be cold to staffers, particularly those who are not in favor with the president, according to a former West Wing aide. “She tries to charm you at first, and then there’ll be the cutting remark in front of her father,” the former adviser added. Kushner, though he tries to be casual and jokes with other staffers, can have even more of an edge. Once, when Priebus asked Kushner what his team of Cordish and Liddell had been up to, Kushner retorted, according to someone who heard the exchange, “Reince, we aren’t getting paid. What the fuck do you care?”

Kushner and Ivanka have complicitly engaged in Trump’s humiliation of various staffers, be it West Wing aides Bannon, Priebus, and Kellyanne Conway, or Cabinet members such as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the most high-profile member of Trump’s team to be dragged into a public flogging. (The president openly discussed in multiple settings his grave disappointment with Sessions for not investigating leaks from the intelligence agencies—notwithstanding the fact that many leaks come from his own White House, and even from him.) Kushner actively smeared Bannon when Bannon was getting too much attention from the media, and both he and Ivanka undermined Reince Priebus directly to Donald Trump. Kushner told Trump repeatedly that Priebus was “weak,” according to several people who heard the comments. And Kushner told Sean Spicer openly in West Wing meetings of his dissatisfaction. Recently, Kushner publicly spoke up in support of National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster, who has been attacked in right-wing media outlets such as Breitbart (to which Bannon has now returned). Why was Kushner willing to stand up for McMaster but not for Sessions, to whom he is close? The main difference was that Trump himself was attacking Sessions, whereas going to bat for McMaster simply meant doing battle, yet again, with Bannon, if only by proxy.

Jared Kushner once described himself as “first among equals” in the West Wing, and one wonders as time goes on if he might be inclined to drop the latter part of that description. “Trump is emotionally dependent on his son-in-law and his daughter . . . but they can’t do anything for him,” said the Washington veteran. “All they can do is make him feel better about what his life has come to.”

IV. EXIT STRATEGY
A combination of self-assurance and utter ignorance is a defining trait of this White House, along with cocky vulgarity and casual cruelty. Jared and Ivanka display the first two traits and can’t help but be tarred by association with the latter two. If they are watching the animals in the Washington zoo carefully enough, they will have noticed that, even as they themselves amass power within the West Wing, their juice outside of it is drying up. Washington is a place where you are judged by what you achieve, not by what you say you care about.

The disappointment among the kinds of people who were looking to them to be a moderating influence is undisguised. As a political consultant puts it, describing the current mood, “You can’t prevent him from trying to de-fund Planned Parenthood or getting out of the Paris agreement? What are you good for?” When Ivanka said soberly in an interview that she tries “to stay out of politics,” she was mocked mercilessly on late-night shows and on Twitter. As a guest on Seth Meyers’s program, Maya Rudolph channeled the First Daughter and echoed Ivanka’s statement, putting “politics” in air quotes: “We get it. We get it,” Rudolph said. “You are an adviser to the president, but not into ‘politics.’ ” She went on to note that Ivanka spoke through her teeth as if she had “a sexy secret,” in the manner of a saleswoman in a lingerie store. What Ivanka was probably trying to say was that she had gone to Washington hoping to work on commonsense programs that Democrats, Republicans, and independents could all get behind. It’s the kind of studied naïveté that fewer and fewer Washington figures are buying today.

John Kelly, the new chief of staff, has insisted that even Kushner and Ivanka check in with him before dropping into the Oval Office, a rule that might be difficult to enforce. Ivanka’s cameos during Trump’s West Wing interviews have become almost de rigueur. She and her daughter, Arabella, dropped in during an Oval Office interview with The New York Times, the same interview in which Trump expressed his disappointment with his attorney general, Jeff Sessions. She also stopped by during a Wall Street Journal interview with Trump, during which the paper’s editor, Gerard Baker, discussed a recent summer party they had both attended at Lally Weymouth’s house in the Hamptons, as well as the fact that both of them have daughters named Arabella. More recently, when Ivanka’s brother Eric and his wife, Lara, visited, the whole family had dinner together in the White House residence. Kelly may be able to instill a sense of discipline in the West Wing, but his authority will have limits.

Attending a joint news conference with German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, in the East Room of the White House.

The time may already be past when Kushner and Ivanka could fully save their own reputations, at least in the kind of society they have enjoyed for much of their young lives—the precincts of Upper East Side socialites for Ivanka and high-society New Jersey for Kushner. They are still trying to salvage what they can. The couple, somewhat famously, seems to skip town at the precise moment a political catastrophe befalls the White House—letting it be known, for instance, that they were on vacation in Vermont when President Trump delivered his deeply troubling statements about the violence in Charlottesville. (One West Wing aide noted to me that it isn’t that they leave when bad things happen; it’s just that bad things are always happening.) They are skiing, as they were in the days leading up to the first failed health-care vote; or observing Shabbat, as they were during the massive protests over the initial Muslim travel ban; or simply fraternizing with their old crowd, as they did during the extended health-care debacle, when they made a surprise trip to the Allen & Co. conference in Sun Valley, the annual gathering of media and tech billionaires and their helpmates. Every election cycle, the conference holds a mock election, and last year Hillary Clinton won by a huge margin—“something like 80 to 20,” in the recollection of one attendee. So it was hardly a welcoming crowd for Kushner and Ivanka, who showed up in slightly dressier casual garb than everyone else. Just hours before they touched down, Barry Diller gave an interview to CNBC from the conference, calling the Trump presidency “just a joke.” He said that he was friendly with Kushner and Ivanka before the “current situation,” and that the two of them couldn’t be blamed for it. That attitude seemed to be widely shared among conference-goers. The attendee told me that “the chatter was ‘These people are horrible,’ and this and that, but of course, Jared and Ivanka show up and the air-kissing began.” Eric Schmidt, the former C.E.O. of Google and the executive chairman of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, seems to personify this shift. Schmidt was an early adviser on digital strategy for Hillary Clinton’s campaign but has been one of the most public fans of Jared Kushner’s work for the Trump campaign. He invited Kushner and Ivanka to Google’s exclusive retreat, called the Camp, in Sicily, but the couple did not attend, reportedly because of the renewed attention on the investigation into whether the Trump campaign had any connection with Russian efforts to tilt the election in Trump’s favor. The couple likely get more of a pass in Sun Valley than they do in Washington, where children often can’t escape the sins of their fathers.

Roughly 90 percent of Washington, D.C., residents voted for Hillary Clinton, which meant that the local reception for Kushner and Ivanka was fraught from the outset. Some parents at the upscale and politically liberal Jewish Primary Day School, where Arabella is enrolled and where former senator Joe Lieberman and former White House chief of staff (and now Chicago mayor) Rahm Emanuel sent their children, anguished over how to temper their disdain for Arabella’s grandfather while welcoming a blameless six-year-old into their ranks. The couple sometimes attend a small Orthodox synagogue, the Shul, near Dupont Circle, within walking distance of their home. Ivanka converted to Orthodox Judaism before her marriage to Kushner, and unless they receive special dispensation from a rabbi, the two are not to drive or use the phone on the Jewish Sabbath. They have needed that dispensation multiple times, including when they both flew to Saudi Arabia on the president’s first international trip.

V. TOO LATE?
The ever shifting nature of the story about the meeting between the Russian lawyer and members of the Trump family is of interest to special counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating ties between Russia and the Trump campaign. In July, Mueller sent a letter to the White House asking officials to preserve documents related to the July 8 meeting aboard Air Force One as well as “any decisions made regarding the recent disclosures about the June 2016 meeting,” according to a copy of the letter reviewed by CNN. As noted, Trump himself directed the drafting of the misleading initial statement about that meeting, and Kushner and Ivanka had advocated fuller disclosure. But questions about the statement remain: “Who was involved in creating this story?,” someone with knowledge of the White House legal strategy asked rhetorically when I inquired about the subject. “This is the problem. They are government employees and they work for the taxpayer.” The issue is no longer just about the appropriateness of a meeting in Trump Tower more than a year ago. The issue now also involves why the president would mislead the public so blatantly and deliberately. And it may involve obstruction of justice. Abbe Lowell, who has previously represented John Edwards and Jack Abramoff, recently noted that he has established a “confidential relationship with Ivanka Trump as part of my representation of Jared.” Politics is new to Jared and Ivanka, but it isn’t just politics that they are navigating. They are in a new town that “punctures their self-esteem on a daily basis,” a New York friend of theirs told me. They know they can never have their New York life back as it existed before Donald Trump started his campaign, nor do they want to give up the power of their current positions in Washington. The future unfolding before them looks nothing like the future they may have imagined five years ago. Ivanka may be disingenuous when she says she “didn’t ask for this,” but she is right to say that she didn’t ask for this—that is, for the actual situation in which they find themselves: powerful, in a sense, and yet ineffectual; emotionally essential to Donald Trump, but lacking the skills to assist; impossible to fire and reluctant to leave; compromised ethically and perhaps legally; and facing reputational or familial harm no matter what they decide to do. Early in the summer, the couple took a weekend trip to New York to visit friends, including Wendi Murdoch, and the trip managed to go unreported, until now. Such moments of privacy are rare. But privacy is less of an issue than the very real trouble that political malpractice and the wheels of justice pose for the entire Trump White House and the two of them. “They are partway across the battlefield,” the New York friend told me. “Turning back now would be more damaging than staying the course.” Whatever the damage, they have partly themselves to blame.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/08 ... gton-elite
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Jared Kushner

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Aug 31, 2017 8:51 am

Kushners’ China Deal Flop Was Part of Much Bigger Hunt for Cash
666 FIFTH AVE. FLOOR PLANS
SOURCE: NEW YORK CITY DEPARTMENT OF FINANCE
By David Kocieniewski and Caleb Melby
August 31, 2017
Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law and top adviser, wakes up each morning to a growing problem that will not go away. His family’s real estate business, Kushner Cos., owes hundreds of millions of dollars on a 41-story office building on Fifth Avenue. It has failed to secure foreign investors, despite an extensive search, and its resources are more limited than generally understood. As a result, the company faces significant challenges.

Over the past two years, executives and family members have sought substantial overseas investment from previously undisclosed places: South Korea’s sovereign-wealth fund, France’s richest man, Israeli banks and insurance companies, and exploratory talks with a Saudi developer, according to former and current executives. These were in addition to previously reported attempts to raise money in China and Qatar.


JARED KUSHNER
PHOTOGRAPHER: ANDREW HARRER / BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES
The family, once one of the largest landlords on the East Coast, sold thousands of apartments to finance its purchase of the tower in 2007 and has borrowed extensively for other purchases. They are walking away from a Brooklyn hotel once considered central to their plans for an office hub. From other properties, they are extracting cash, including tens of millions in borrowed funds from the recently acquired former New York Times building. What’s more, their partner in the Fifth Avenue building, Vornado Realty Trust, headed by Steve Roth, has stood aside, allowing the Kushners to pursue financing on their own.

Kushner Cos. says it will prevail. Laurent Morali, the president, said the company has a variety of contingency plans for the building and its broader portfolio will allow it to sustain any setback. He said he is encouraged by the interest of several potential investors, but declined to name them.

“Reports that portray it as a distressed situation are just not accurate for the building or for the company,” Morali said in an interview on the 15th floor of the building, 666 Fifth Avenue.

But there are challenges all around. The mortgage on their tower is due in 18 months. This has led to concerns that Kushner could use—or has perhaps already used—his official position to prop up the family business despite having divested to close relatives his ownership in many projects to conform with government ethics requirements. Federal investigators are examining Kushner’s finances and business dealings, along with those of other Trump associates, as they probe possible collusion between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign. Kushner has already testified twice before closed congressional committees and denies mixing family business with his official role.

This article, which describes new details of the company’s troubled finances and its overseas fundraising efforts, is based on a review of thousands of pages of financial documents and interviews with more than two dozen executives, business partners, real estate agents, deal participants and analysts. They spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private deals. Some feared legal reprisals or other retaliation from one of the country’s most powerful families.

The portrait that emerges is that of a real estate company established by a pair of penniless Holocaust survivors, its extraordinary expansion by their children, the rise of a grandson to a top White House role and a big bet that has complicated its financial future.

It was 2006—the height of the real-estate market boom—when Kushner Cos. agreed to buy 666 Fifth Avenue for $1.8 billion, then a record for a Manhattan building. All of it was borrowed except for $50 million. The company still holds half of a $1.2 billion mortgage, on which it hasn’t paid a cent. The full amount is due in February 2019.

The strain has become increasingly evident across their holdings. One person familiar with the company’s finances describes the tower, with its low ceilings and outdated floor plan, as the Jenga puzzle piece that could set the empire teetering.


666 FIFTH AVE.
PHOTOGRAPHER: VICTOR J. BLUE / BLOOMBERG
The family’s idea of how to salvage its investment requires razing the building to the ground and constructing an 80-story tower with greatly expanded retail areas and high-end condominiums. No short- or medium-term return can be expected from such an aggressive approach. Even a return over the long run would be speculative, though Morali describes the plan as “ambitious and creative.” That narrows the pool of investors to those interested in something other than profit. Real estate experts say this almost certainly precludes U.S. companies. More likely: a foreign firm looking to get capital out of its country or seeking a trophy Manhattan property.

Before Trump began his rise to the presidency and the 36-year-old Kushner became his senior adviser, 666 Fifth Avenue struggled to attract serious offers. Meetings the Kushners requested were often rejected. After Trump’s nomination, billions of dollars in Asian and Middle Eastern money came under discussion. Two potential deals that made it to advanced stages, with China’sAnbang Insurance Group and a top Qatari sheikh, fell apart.


JARED KUSHNER SITTING WITH OTHER SENIOR WHITE HOUSE STAFF
PHOTOGRAPHER: ANDREW HARRER / BLOOMBERG
The new status meant the Kushners’ calls were more readily answered—but they came with additional scrutiny, not only of the Kushners but also of the investors. Since January, the company has ceased entering into business relationships with sovereign entities, Morali said. Federal investigators want to know if the Fifth Avenue building’s finances came up in a post-election meeting Kushner had with the head of Russia’s state-controlled development bank.

The Kushners have reason to look far afield. Even after selling big sections of 666 Fifth in 2011, they have increased their own vulnerability by borrowing more money for other deals, people close to the company say. After a refinancing, the deed to 666 Fifth sits in an escrow account, ready to be seized by lenders in a default, an action indicating their trust has grown thin. The mortgage will become even more of a burden after a scheduled jump in interest rates in December. Under some dire circumstances, guarantees in the refinancing agreement could even give lenders the ability to go after the family’s other assets—many of which are also underpinned by debt.

Towering Debt
Debt payments have almost always eclipsed net income at 666 Fifth Avenue. A two-year respite followed a hard-fought loan refinancing deal.
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
0
20
40
60
$80
M
Debt payments
Net operating income
DATA COMPILED BY BLOOMBERG FROM LENDERS ON 666 FIFTH AVENUE
While 666 Fifth Avenue has been a drain, Kushner Cos. has continued to make big moves across New York City, and company officials say those assets insulate the business. It has expanded its footprint by $1 billion, including the Times building and properties formerly owned by the Jehovah’s Witnesses, according to data firm Real Capital Analytics. Morali, sitting in a conference room below a painting of the company’s founders—Jared Kushner’s grandparents—says even a worst-case scenario at 666 Fifth would do minor damage to the company, because “it’s just one small piece of the portfolio.”

But after selling 18,000 mid-Atlantic apartments in 2007, the Kushners only partially own a substantial number of the company’s assets. In many cases, Kushner Cos. has partnered with well-capitalized firms that want to invest in real estate and seek out experienced locals for deals. These include the Israeli firm Gaia Investment Corp. as well as Oaktree Capital Management, the Los Angeles-based asset manager, and Stonehage Fleming, a London firm that invests money on behalf of 250 wealthy families primarily from Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

As a privately held business, Kushners Cos. doesn’t generally have to disclose how ownership breaks down between it and its partners, and Morali declined to provide details. But there are clues. One Brooklyn development site purchased in 2014 for about $75 million and heralded by the real estate press as “Jared Kushner’s big Gowanus project”—so-named for the canal it abuts—is in fact barely owned by the Kushners at all. SL Green Realty Corp., their partner in the endeavor, owns 95 percent of it, according to a regulatory filing. The remaining 5 percent is split between the Kushners, and LIVWRK, another developer. Elsewhere in Brooklyn, where the Kushners partnered with RFR Realty to purchase buildings owned by the Jehovah’s Witnesses, they own about half of the project’s equity.

It’s here where the Kushners have scaled back. Among the six buildings the partnership purchased for $375 million in 2013 is a 30-story hotel at 90 Sands Street scheduled to be turned over to the Kushner group later this year. Kushner Cos. is now exiting the partnership and selling its stake to RFR, Morali said. Leaving the property means narrowing its role in a planned tech-centric Brooklyn office hub—its most ambitious project since purchasing 666 Fifth.

Kushner Cos. New York Area Properties

666 FIFTH AVE.
229 W 43RD ST.
1 JOURNAL SQUARE
TRUMP BAY STREET
55 PROSPECT ST.
117 ADAMS ST.
81 PROSPECT ST.
77 SANDS ST.
90 SANDS ST.
175 PEARL ST.
DATA: REAL CAPITAL ANALYTICS
The Kushners are also extracting cash from properties in which they do own significant stakes. Six floors of the former New York Times building, which they purchased for $295 million in 2015, now have $370 million of debt against them, loan documents show. Of that amount, at least $59 million was used to return cash to the Kushners.

Across the Hudson River at Trump Bay Street, a luxury residential building in Jersey City, the family plans to take out $50 million, Bloomberg previously reported. Efforts over the summer to obtain a $250 million mortgage for the property struggled in the face of controversy around their use of an investment-for-visa program. Now the company has found a lender, Morali says, declining to name the firm.

Central to the fate of 666 Fifth yet noticeably absent from the gyrations around it, is Steve Roth, Vornado’s chairman and chief executive officer, whose firm owns almost half the building’s offices and most of its stores following a 2011 refinancing. When an analyst asked Roth about 666 Fifth in an August earnings call, he demurred, saying the issue was being debated. Two spokesmen for Roth declined to comment for this article.

In 2014, at a meeting in his 57th Street headquarters with Jared Kushner and his father, Charles Kushner, as well as others wrestling with how to save the investment, Roth argued against the Kushners’ extravagant renovation plans, saying, “It would be worth a lot more if it was just dirt,” according to two people who were there.


STEVE ROTH
PHOTOGRAPHER: MISHA FRIEDMAN / BLOOMBERG
Roth is famous for his unsentimental patience. In an April letter to investors concerning a recent dip in demand for retail property, he described an opportunity to “feed on the carnage” for those with ample capital at their disposal—a chance to profit from the overleveraged and underprepared.

That’s what Roth saw when his firm came to Kushner’s rescue in 2011, according to three people familiar with his thinking at the time. For $80 million and the assumption of half the debt, Vornado put itself in the best position to become 666 Fifth’s sole owner in the event of a restructuring or worse.

This may help to explain why Vornado has allowed Kushner Cos. to shoulder the burden of hunting for potential partners and lenders, according to four people. Another reason: Roth’s concern about his own legacy. Now in his mid-70s, having exited retirement only after his handpicked successor left Vornado, he has little desire to gamble his career on a family and a property with uncertain futures, the people said.

Morali said Vornado and Kushner Cos. are equal partners in the tower and will jointly decide its fate.

Gold on Fifth Avenue
Leasing and selling the building’s stores on the world’s most valuable shopping strip helped the Kushners dig themselves out of a deep hole.

① The original tenants ② Kushners partner with Carlyle Group ③ The first buyouts ④ Hollister and Uniqlo move in ⑤ Space sold to Zara ⑥ Kushners sell last stake

DATA: BLOOMBERG REPORTING
The troubles caused by 666 Fifth have their origins in the overheated moment of its purchase. On Thanksgiving of 2006, Charlie Kushner made clear he wanted all employees in the office the next day. Tishman Speyer Properties, a real estate company with a New York pedigree his own company lacked, was looking to sell an office tower in midtown Manhattan, and Kushner wanted it. Tishman was demanding that the deal be done fast. The financing had to be put together by Sunday.

In retrospect, it would be difficult to imagine a worse time for the Kushners to have entered Manhattan real estate. Pension funds, insurers and other blue-chip firms wanted in on a market that many believed would climb forever, and landlords were loath to sell. The combination of new demand and limited supply created frenzy over each transaction, doubling prices.

Buying High
Shortly after Kushner Cos. bought 666 Fifth, rental rates dropped precipitously.
-30
-15
0
15
30
45
%
Year-over-year change
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
Kushner agrees to buy 666 Fifth Avenue
DATA: CUSHMAN & WAKEFIELD
The Kushners didn’t have much cash on hand, weren’t in the habit of taking out 10-figure mortgages and weren’t very well known, so they needed an aggressive offer. Charlie Kushner’s dealmakers couldn’t get the numbers to add up, but he didn’t care. “I buy it, you make it work,” he told his accountants, according to a participant in the meeting.

A kingmaker in New Jersey Democratic politics, Kushner had been out of prison just three months for making illegal campaign contributions and, in a bizarre episode that the tabloids couldn’t get enough of, hiring a prostitute to entrap his brother-in-law. He wanted a prestige Manhattan property to mark a fresh start for the family business, which would now be led, if mostly in appearance, by his eldest child, Jared Kushner, who frequently consulted his father. Charlie had recently been turned down for towers including the Seagram Building. He saw securing Tishman’s property as a way to plant his flag.

Over the weekend, the Kushners and their partners worked out a deal in which they would put down $50 million—a pittance. Barclays Bank Plc and UBS Group AG funded $1.75 billion of the purchase, $535 million of it in short-term, high-interest loans. The terms were demanding, bordering on untenable. Nevertheless, after the deal closed in January 2007, the group celebrated with a party at one of the most expensive restaurants in New York, Per Se. Everyone there was given a pair of silver cufflinks fashioned in the embossed look of the building’s exterior.

High-stakes business mixed with politics and unwelcome publicity isn’t new to Jared Kushner. It characterized his initiation into the family firm. He was 23, just out of Harvard, when he was thrust into its leadership after his father went to prison.


CHARLES KUSHNER WITH HIS WIFE SERYL (LEFT) AND ATTORNEY BENJAMIN BRAFMAN (RIGHT)
PHOTOGRAPHER: RICK MAIMAN / BLOOMBERG
Charlie and his three siblings had inherited a small real estate company from their parents, and under Charlie’s leadership, Kushner Cos. flourished. Over two decades, Charlie amassed about 25,000 middle- and working-class apartments, making him one of New Jersey’s largest landlords. Plain but lucrative, these massive suburban complexes threw off enough cash to fuel his political ambitions. As a major donor to the national Democratic Party, Charlie received visits from President Bill Clinton; he was also the single biggest financial backer of former New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey, who appointed him to the board of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

But Charlie used company money for his political donations, and his siblings didn’t care for it, leading to the infamous lawsuit and prosecution. Then-U.S. Attorney Chris Christie began a grand jury investigation.

The arrest and its coverage made Jared’s entry into the company hierarchy a crucible and strengthened his already fierce attachment to his father. During Charlie Kushner’s 14-month incarceration in an Alabama penitentiary, Jared flew down every Sunday. For years, he carried a wallet his dad had made him in the prison workshop. While his father was behind bars, Jared bought the New York Observer newspaper as a platform to reach the Manhattan elite and began pushing for the company to leave New Jersey behind. He ultimately set his sights on 666 Fifth.

At 1.5 million square feet, the 1950s building ranks nowhere near the largest of New York skyscrapers. Its low ceilings and closely built columns give it a dark, closed-off feel—anathema in the era of light-filled open-plan offices.

“If that building was beginning to look obsolete at the time of purchase, it is totally obsolete now,” says Jesse Keenan, a Harvard lecturer on architecture who wrote a 2013 report on the building for Kushner Cos. He notes that Manhattan is in the midst of its largest office-construction boom since the 1980s. The most prestigious occupants—hedge funds, private equity and law firms—are moving west to new buildings, shifting the center of gravity away from the Kushners.


666 FIFTH AVE.
PHOTOGRAPHER: VICTOR J. BLUE / BLOOMBERG
As the building’s fate became increasingly bleak, the family, rather than forfeit, decided to go big. Their plan was to raze the structure and replace it with a glimmering Zaha Hadid-designed tower of massive proportions. The scale of the plan stirred the imagination, but the costs were astronomical because they involved repurchasing the property rights they’d sold to keep the original building afloat. That alone would require more than $1 billion. The elaborate renderings of the reconfigured building promised a kind of Time Warner Center on steroids: more than 80 stories with five levels of retail, a hotel and record-breaking expensive luxury condos on top.

For all its inspiring visuals, investors who reviewed the early version of the Kushners’ pitch book noticed a conspicuous omission: numbers. The company circulated a revised pitch, complete with financials, and the scale of the debt and risk involved were jarring. With a $4 billion construction loan and a business model that assumed the condos would sell at the aggressive price of $9,000 per square foot, it was similar to the leap of faith the Kushners had taken by overpaying for the original building a decade earlier, just before the boom went bust. A simple downturn in high-end New York real estate and the colossal new building would be in a hole of titanic proportions.

One early stop on the Kushners’ tour: Israel. Familiar with the country from their involvement in Jewish business ventures and philanthropy, they were able to partner with companies including Harel Insurance, Bank Leumi and Bank Hapoalim BM on various New York properties. But none invested in 666 Fifth.

Richard Goettlich, whom Charlie Kushner met in prison and hired, used his contacts to find others, former company employees say. In 2012, he approached Gaia, a firm connected to one of Israel’s wealthiest families, the Steinmetzes, whose fortune is derived from African diamonds. Gaia partnered with Kushner on a number of New York City buildings but not 666 Fifth. Goettlich didn’t respond to several requests for comment.

A pitch was made to Bernard Arnault, France’s richest man and the CEO of luxury-goods maker LVMH, to see if he might buy into the project’s multi-floor mall. He passed as well. A spokesman for Arnault declined to comment.

As 2015 drew to a close, there were no serious offers, and many in the company figured the plans were all but dead. Then Donald Trump began his meteoric political rise, and Jared Kushner was right on his coattails. Discussions heated up. Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim Al Thani, the Qatari businessman who had once run that nation’s sovereign-wealth fund, had earlier declined to even take a meeting with the Kushner Cos. executives, according to people familiar with the talks. In 2016, Al Thani agreed to invest $500 million from the private fund he runs, contingent on investment from others, which failed to materialize.


JARED KUSHNER AND DONALD TRUMP
PHOTOGRAPHER: OLIVIER DOULIERY / BLOOMBERG
Also in 2016, Charlie and Jared met in New York with executives from the government-controlled South Korean sovereign fund asking for an investment in 666 Fifth. The Korea Investment Corporation didn’t invest, people familiar with the talks said.

The Kushners opened discussions with Anbang, the Chinese insurance giant with such close ties to the ruling party that the federal government has forbidden it from buying near a U.S. military base. During months of talks—before and after the election—Jared Kushner negotiated a proposal for Anbang to put billions into the building and allow the family firm to take away $400 million in cash. After details of that plan were made public in March, Anbang walked away amid a crackdown on foreign investments by Chinese regulators.

Representatives of Kushners Cos. also discussed the project with an executive working for Fawaz Alhokair, a Saudi billionaire whose company has vast holdings in shopping malls, hotels and real estate overseas. Alhokair made a splash in the U.S. when he paid $87.7 million for a Park Avenue penthouse. Alhokair’s company considered a possible investment in late 2015, according to Simon Marshall, who was CEO of Alhokair until this year.

Marshall said he analyzed the retail portion of the proposal. The building’s financial viability relied on a plan to construct five levels of luxury shopping at the base of a gleaming new tower. Marshall, who had overseen Alhokair’s retail operations around the world, said he found the projections to be more than the New York luxury-retail market would bear.

“The numbers just didn’t work,” Marshall said in a telephone interview, adding that politics played no role in the decision not to invest. The proposal remained on the table into late 2016, he said, as Trump continued on his path to the White House. Fawaz Alhokair didn’t respond to calls and emails for comment; Kushner Cos. also declined comment.

Staying in the Red
A decade of debts and deals
Equity Loan Short-term, high-interest loan Hope loan

JAN 2007
The Kushners buy 666 Fifth for $1.8B, mostly with debt. Of that, $535M was in short-term, high interest loans.

JULY 2008
Kushner Cos. sells 49 percent of the retail spaces to Carlyle Group LP and Crown Acquisitions for $525M, and refinances the short-term debt.

MARCH 2011
The Kushner group sells one retail unit to Zara-owner Inditex SA for $324M.

2011
Vornado agrees to buy a 49.5 percent stake in the tower’s office spaces and adds $80 million of new equity. Kushner Cos. adds $30M. A portion of the principle loan—$115M—becomes a “hope note,” considered unlikely to be repaid.

JULY 2012
Vornado agrees to buy remaining retail space from Kushner and Carlyle for $707M.

Even after all of these deals, the Kushners still haven’t touched the $1.1B principle.
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
$1.80B▼TOTAL
$50M▼DOWN PAYMENT
$1.215B▲
PRINCIPLE LOAN

$335M▲
MEZZANINE LOAN BARCLAYS & UBS

$200M▲
MEZZANINE LOAN BARCLAYS & UBS

$50M▼DOWN PAYMENT
$1.215B▲
PRINCIPLE LOAN

$325M▲
LOAN FROM BARCLAYS

$135M▲
LOAN FROM SL GREEN

$50M▼DOWN PAYMENT
$1.215B▲
PRINCIPLE LOAN

$325M▲
LOAN FROM BARCLAYS

$135M▼LOAN FROM SL GREEN
$160M▼EQUITY
$1.1B▲
PRINCIPLE LOAN

$115M▼HOPE LOAN
$160M▼EQUITY
$1.1B▲
PRINCIPLE LOAN

$115M▼HOPE LOAN
$1.1B▲
PRINCIPLE LOAN

Federal investigators know that Kushner met with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in Trump Tower last December and later met with Sergey Gorkov, head of the Kremlin-controlled VEB bank in two meetings that he didn’t, at first, disclose publicly or on his application for his national-security clearance. After those meetings became public, Kushner and the White House said the contacts were made in his role as a Trump adviser and didn’t involve discussion of his family business. But VEB and a spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin described the meetings quite differently, noted Adam Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. They said that Kushner was there in his capacity as head of his family’s real estate business. Investigators say they are studying those accounts with keen interest.

“I think it is part of a pattern of outreach to Russian financial interests, which are essentially Vladimir Putin and his oligarch circle, by Trump family members,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, a Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee. “The financial dealings are important because we know that the Russian playbook is to engage and compromise foreign leaders.” He added, “Whether this meeting and contact are significant remains to be understood.” —With assistance from Billy House and Steven T. Dennis.
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017 ... -for-cash/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
User avatar
seemslikeadream
 
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Re: Jared Kushner

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Sep 15, 2017 11:05 am

Kushner told Steven Bertoni of Forbes. “We brought in Cambridge Analytica. I called some of my friends from Silicon Valley who were some of the best digital marketers in the world. And I asked them how to scale this stuff . . . We basically had to build a $400 million operation with 1,500 people operating in 50 states, in five months to then be taken apart. We started really from scratch.”




New revelations about Mueller’s Russia investigation put Jared Kushner squarely in the hot seat

13 SEP 2017 AT 14:36 ET

A series of revelations this week shows the federal probe of President Donald Trump’s alleged campaign ties to Russia has centered around social media propaganda.

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team of prosecutors and FBI agents have focused on Russian efforts to spread fake news stories on Facebook and Twitter, which were frequently amplified by Trump on the campaign trail, reported Bloomberg Politics.

Facebook acknowledged last week that Russian companies had bought $100,000 in ads intended to help the Trump campaign and confirmed the shutdown of multiple pages used by Russian agents to promote anti-immigration rallies echoing Islamophobic conspiracy theories spread among right-wing websites like Breitbart News.

That relatively small ad buy would be nearly useless — unless they were targeted to specific audiences, or even drilled down to specific users.

Both Mueller’s team and congressional investigators are examining whether the Trump campaign’s digital operation — which was overseen by son-in-law Jared Kushner — helped guide Russia’s sophisticated targeting of social media users.

The data firm Cambridge Analytica, headed by Trump megadonor Robert Mercer, used personal information harvested from Facebook users to build psychological profiles based on 5,000 separate pieces of data on 220 million American voters, which the company used to target their emotions and influence their thoughts and behavior.

That allowed the Trump campaign to turn Facebook into a propaganda cannon, and investigators are looking into whether Kushner helped Russia bombard American voters with fake news intended to help Trump win.

The FBI is reportedly investigating Russian state-owned media outlets Sputnik and RT for disinformation campaigns aimed at American consumers, who in turn unwittingly spread Kremlin propaganda on their own news feeds.

Reports about Mueller’s “red-hot” focus on social media comes as bipartisan leaders on the Senate Intelligence Committee have called on Facebook and other social media companies to be more transparent about foreign influence campaigns and other election activities.

The social media giant has not described the ads and believes the information may be protected under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, and it refuses to say how it discovered 470 fake accounts and pages linked to the ads.

Journalist Casey Michel, who tracks U.S. secession movements, discovered a Facebook group linked to Russia that organized anti-immigrant and anti-Hillary Clinton rallies in Texas in the days ahead of the presidential election, reported Business Insider.

The “Heart of Texas” group promoted anti-Clinton and anti-establishment themes, along with secessionist ideas, in awkwardly phrased and misspelled memes that betrayed their non-U.S. origins — but the page boasted 225,000 followers last summer.

It’s not clear how many people actually showed up at those rallies, but it shows how the Kremlin hoped to use propaganda to influence American politics ahead of the election and promote fringe views.

“This is the next step,” Clint Watts, a former FBI agent and cybersecurity expert, told The Daily Beast. “The objective of influence is to create behavior change. The simplest behavior is to have someone disseminate propaganda that Russia created and seeded. The second part of behavior influence is when you can get people to physically do something.”

Watts told congressional investigators in March that Russian agents exploited the inability of many social media users to properly weigh evidence — and he said those efforts were specifically targeted to the most famous and powerful Twitter user in the world.

“Part of the reason active measures have worked in this election is because the commander-in-chief has used active measures at times against his opponents,” Watts testified.
http://www.rawstory.com/2017/09/new-rev ... -hot-seat/


Problems at 666 Fifth Avenue tower linked to Jared Kushner’s White House role
POSTED ON THU, SEPTEMBER 14, 2017 BY DEVIN GANNON


A rendering of 666 Fifth Avenue, courtesy of Kushner Companies/Zaha Hadid Architects

In 2007, Kushner Companies purchased a 41-story tower in Midtown for $1.8 billion, which was the most expensive real estate deal ever in the U.S. at the time. The transaction of 666 Fifth Avenue, coordinated by Jared Kushner, now a senior advisor to President Donald Trump, was ill-timed, making the purchase just before the economic recession. As the Washington Post reported, the Fifth Avenue project is one of the most financially troubled for Kushner Cos., with one-fourth of office space empty, and its lease revenue not covering monthly interest payments. While Kushner has divested his stake in the property to avoid conflicts of interest, the property’s value has dropped and foreign entities have withdrawn financial support. Currently, Kushner’s dealings are under investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller, as part of the broader investigation into Russian collusion with the Trump campaign.


666 Fifth Avenue, Kushner Companies, Jared Kushner
A rendering of 666 Fifth Avenue, courtesy of Kushner Companies/Zaha Hadid Architects

To purchase the nearly $2 billion Fifth Avenue property, the Kushners had sold most of their real estate in New Jersey. After the Great Recession dropped the property’s value significantly, Kushner nearly lost the building in 2010. He was late on payments and was forced to restructure his debt. Kushner turned to two friends of his father-in-law for help, Thomas Barrack of Colony Capital and Steve Roth of Vornado Realty Trust.

Barrack’s real estate company in 2010 invested $45 million and took on part of the building’s debt, eventually making a profit. In 2011, Roth’s company bought 49.5 percent of the office portion of the Fifth Avenue property, allowing Kushner to restructure the debt and extend the $1.2 billion loan until 2019.

Since then, problems have persisted at 666 Fifth Avenue. As the Post learned from lending documents, the occupancy rate has dropped to 70 percent. Citibank, one the main tenants, has left the property except for one small space. The law firm, Philip Nizer, which has occupied two floors of the building for decades, is leaving at the end of this year. Plus, the building’s net operating income has dropped to $41 million from $61 million in 2007.

In an attempt to salvage the property’s money-making capabilities, Kushner Cos. and Vornado Realty revealed plans in March to redevelop the property for a cost that could range from $7.5 billion to $12 billion. The plan would convert the tower into an 80-story office tower, adding hotel rooms and luxury housing, designed by the late architecture icon, Zaha Hadid.

In March, 6sqft covered the decision of Anbang, a Chinese insurance company, to back out of the redevelopment of 666 Fifth Avenue. Their withdrawal from talks regarding the property came about after Kushner’s meetings with a Russian bank, known for its close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, were disclosed publicly. Plus, Anbang is closely tied to the Chinese government, which has previously raised security issues about U.S. investment. Kushner told Congress in July that the meeting did not involve “any discussion about my companies, business transactions, real estate projects, loans, banking arrangements or any private business of any kind.”

The former prime minister of Qatar, Hamad Bin Jasim al-Thani, was a potential investor in 666 Fifth Avenue, who was expected to provide $500 million. The official also backed away from the deal and the Kushner Cos. lost out on the investment. The balance of the $1.2 billion mortgage for 666 Fifth Avenue will be due in February 2019.
https://www.6sqft.com/problems-at-666-f ... ouse-role/



Who’s Telling the Truth About the Russia Meeting: Kushner or Trump Jr.?

And did they actually accept an opposition research document from Moscow?
DAVID CORN
SEP. 14, 2017 1:24 PM

For months, Donald Trump and his lieutenants insisted there was no collusion between the Trump crowd and Vladimir Putin’s regime during the 2016 election. But after news broke of the June 9, 2016, meeting that brought Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort together with a Kremlin emissary bearing dirt on Hillary Clinton as part of a secret Russia government effort to help Trump, no one could accurately say there had been no collaboration between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. So the Trump crew then shifted its denials and claimed that nothing came out of the meeting. But given that the Trump camp first covered up the existence of the meeting and then lied about its origin and purpose—until Trump Jr. was forced to release emails about the gathering—there is no good reason to accept the assertion that the session was a bust. Moreover, a review of the recent statements issued by Trump Jr. and Kushner about the meeting reveals an important contradiction between their accounts.

The emails sent before the meeting indicated that a representative of the Russian prosecutor general would be conveying government information that the Trump campaign could use against Clinton, and Trump Jr. expressed enthusiasm about this prospect. Kushner and Manafort received those emails, as well. Both Kushner and Trump Jr. have recently put out similar statements that dismiss the whole episode as a nothing-burger. But there is an intriguing difference in their recollections.

Here’s a portion of Trump Jr.’s account:

As I recall, at or around 4 pm, Rob Goldstone [the manager of Emin Agalarov, a pop singer and Russian business contact of the Trumps] came up to our offices and entered our conference room with a [Russian] lawyer who I now know to be Natalia Veselnitskaya. Joining them was a translator and a man who was introduced to me as Irakli Kaveladze [a US-based executive in the Russian development company run by Agalarov and his father]. After a few minutes, Jared and Paul joined…After perfunctory greetings, the lawyer began telling the group very generally something about individuals connected to Russia supporting or funding Democratic Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton or the Democratic National Committee. It was quite difficult for me to understand what she was saying or why. Given our busy schedules, we politely asked if she could be more specific and provide more clarity about her objective for the meeting. At that point, Ms. Veselnitskaya pivoted and began talking about the adoption of Russian children by U.S. citizens and something called the Magnitsky Act…At this point, Jared excused himself from the meeting to take a phone call.

Here’s what Kushner said happened:

I arrived at the meeting a little late. When I got there, the person who has since been identified as a Russian attorney was talking about the issue of a ban on U.S. adoptions of Russian children. I had no idea why that topic was being raised and quickly determined that my time was not well-spent at this meeting. Reviewing emails recently confirmed my memory that the meeting was a waste of our time and that, in looking for a polite way to leave and get back to my work, I actually emailed an assistant from the meeting after I had been there for ten or so minutes and wrote “Can u pls call me on my cell? Need excuse to get out of meeting.”…No part of the meeting I attended included anything about the campaign.

What’s different? Trump Jr. recounted that Kushner was present when Veselnitskaya discussed contributions to Clinton and the DNC that the Russians thought could somehow be used against Clinton. Kushner asserted he only heard the Russian lawyer talk about the adoption issue.

The conversation clearly was not confined to the Magnitsky Act (which imposed sanctions on certain Russian businessmen and officials) and the adoption matter (the Putin government blocked US adoptions of Russian children in retaliation for the Magnitsky Act). Rinat Akhmetshin, a Russian-born American lobbyist and a colleague of Veselnitskaya who was at the meeting, told the Washington Post that Veselnitskaya presented to the Trump advisers what she called “a great campaign issue” for the Trump campaign: allegations of Russian tax improprieties by a US venture capital firm whose executives were political donors, including one who contributed to the Clinton Foundation.

That is, the meeting did indeed cover what the emails said it would: information the Russians believed could be damaging to Clinton. Trump Jr. claimed this material was too difficult to understand. Still, his account suggests Kushner was present for this part of the discussion—which would mean Kushner, too, participated in the attempted collusion. Kushner’s statement, though, protects him from such a charge.

There is another interesting discrepancy in the various accounts. Akhmetshin said that Veselnitskaya gave the Trump associates a document describing the anti-Clinton allegations. “It was corporate stuff—lawyerly stuff,” Akhmetshin explained. But Trump Jr. said in his statement, “I have no recollection of any documents being offered or left for us.” Kushner, too, asserted in his statement, “I have no knowledge of any documents being offered or accepted.” So did Trump’s top advisers accept a document from Russian government sources as part of a Russian conspiracy to assist the Trump campaign?

Sorting out what occurred in Trump Tower on that day—and if any subsequent actions and contacts occurred—will be an important task for special counsel Robert Mueller and congressional investigators. Resolving these contradictions will be just a start.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/201 ... -trump-jr/



DID JARED KUSHNER’S DATA OPERATION HELP SELECT FACEBOOK TARGETS FOR THE RUSSIANS?
The Russians used social media to rile the electorate. Investigators wonder if they had inside help.
BY CHRIS SMITH
SEPTEMBER 15, 2017 1:08 PM

The headlines were about Facebook admitting it had sold ad space to Russian groups trying to sway the 2016 presidential campaign. But investigators shrugged: they’d known or assumed for months that Facebook, as well as Twitter and other social-media platforms, were a tool used in the Kremlin’s campaign. “The only thing that’s surprising is that more revelations like this haven’t come out sooner,” said Congressman Mike Quigley, an Illinois Democrat and a member of the House Intelligence Committee. “And I expect that more will.”

Mapping the full Russian propaganda effort is important. Yet investigators in the House, Senate, and special counsel Robert Mueller’s office are equally focused on a more explosive question: did any Americans help target the memes and fake news to crucial swing districts and wavering voter demographics? “By Americans, you mean, like, the Trump campaign?” a source close to one of the investigations said with a dark laugh. Indeed: probers are intrigued by the role of Jared Kushner, the now-president’s son-in-law, who eagerly took credit for crafting the Trump campaign’s online efforts in a rare interview right after the 2016 election. “I called somebody who works for one of the technology companies that I work with, and I had them give me a tutorial on how to use Facebook micro-targeting,” Kushner told Steven Bertoni of Forbes. “We brought in Cambridge Analytica. I called some of my friends from Silicon Valley who were some of the best digital marketers in the world. And I asked them how to scale this stuff . . . We basically had to build a $400 million operation with 1,500 people operating in 50 states, in five months to then be taken apart. We started really from scratch.”

Kushner’s chat with Forbes has provided a veritable bakery’s worth of investigatory bread crumbs to follow. Brad Parscale, who Kushner hired to run the campaign’s San Antonio-based Internet operation, has agreed to be interviewed by the House Intelligence Committee.

Video: Middle East Journeyman

Bigger questions, however, revolve around Cambridge Analytica. It is unclear how Kushner first became aware of the data-mining firm, but one of its major investors is billionaire Trump backer Robert Mercer. Mercer was also a principal patron of Breitbart News and Steve Bannon, who was a vice president of Cambridge Analytica until he joined the Trump campaign. “I think the Russians had help,” said Congresswoman Jackie Speier, a California Democrat who is a member of the House Intelligence Committee. “I’ve always wondered if Cambridge Analytica was part of that.” (Cambridge Analytica did not respond to a request for comment.)

Senator Martin Heinrich is leading the charge to update American election laws so that the origins of political ads on social media are at least as transparent as those on TV and in print. Heinrich, a New Mexico Democrat, is also part of the Senate Intelligence Committee that is tracing Russia’s 2016 tactics. “Paul Manafort made an awful lot of money coming up with a game plan for how Russian interests could be pushed in Western countries and Western elections,” Heinrich said, referring to a mid-2000s proposal Manafort pitched to a Russian oligarch. “Suddenly he finds himself in the middle of this campaign. If there is a person who I think is very sophisticated in this stuff, and runs in pretty dicey circles, that is the place where I would dig.”
No evidence has emerged to link Kushner, Cambridge Analytica, or Manafort to the Russian election-meddling enterprise; all have denied colluding with foreign agents. (Kushner’s representatives declined to comment for this article. Manafort’s spokesman could not be reached.) Yet analysts scoff at the notion that the Russians figured out how to target African-Americans and women in decisive precincts in Wisconsin and Michigan all by themselves. “Could they have hired a warehouse full of people in Moscow and had them read Nate Silver’s blog every morning and determine what messages to post to what demographics? Sure, theoretically that’s possible,” said Mike Carpenter, an Obama administration assistant defense secretary who specialized in Russia and Eastern Europe. “But that’s not how they do this. And it’s not surprising that it took Facebook this long to figure out the ad buys. The Russians are excellent at covering their tracks. They’ll subcontract people in Macedonia or Albania or Cyprus and pay them via the dark Web. They always use locals to craft the campaign appropriately. My only question about 2016 is who exactly was helping them here.”

Maybe no one. Or perhaps the chaotic Trump campaign unwittingly enlisted Russian-connected proxies who were eager to exploit any opening to damage Hillary Clinton’s run. It’s also plausible that Trump’s long-shot, anti-establishment bid was willing to take on assistance without asking too many questions. “Are we connecting the dots? I’m finding more dots,” said Quigley, who recently traveled to Prague and Budapest to learn more about the history of Russian influence campaigns. “I believe there was coordination, and I’m going to leave it at that for now.”
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/09 ... a-facebook
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Jared Kushner

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Sep 24, 2017 6:06 pm

Kushner used private email to conduct White House business
The senior adviser set up the account after the election. Other West Wing officials have also used private email accounts for official business.
By JOSH DAWSEY 09/24/2017 03:34 PM EDT

White House senior adviser Jared Kushner has been under scrutiny in the ongoing Russia probes, which have expanded to include potential obstruction of justice by the president and his aides since January, and Kushner’s private email traffic may also be of interest to FBI and congressional investigators. | Pablo Marintez Monsivais/AP

Presidential son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner has corresponded with other administration officials about White House matters through a private email account set up during the transition last December, part of a larger pattern of Trump administration aides using personal email accounts for government business.

Kushner uses his private account alongside his official White House email account, sometimes trading emails with senior White House officials, outside advisers and others about media coverage, event planning and other subjects, according to four people familiar with the correspondence. POLITICO has seen and verified about two dozen emails.

“Mr. Kushner uses his White House email address to conduct White House business,” Abbe Lowell, a lawyer for Kushner, said in a statement Sunday. “Fewer than 100 emails from January through August were either sent to or returned by Mr. Kushner to colleagues in the White House from his personal email account. These usually forwarded news articles or political commentary and most often occurred when someone initiated the exchange by sending an email to his personal rather than his White House address.”

Aides who have exchanged emails with Kushner on his private account since President Donald Trump took office in January include former chief of staff Reince Priebus, former chief strategist Steve Bannon, National Economic Council director Gary Cohn, and spokesman Josh Raffel, according to emails described to or shown to POLITICO. In some cases, those White House officials have emailed Kushner’s account first, said people familiar with the messages.

The decision to set up new, private accounts as Kushner was preparing to enter the White House came in the wake of a bitter election campaign in which Trump routinely excoriated his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton for using a personal email account to handle government business when she was secretary of state.

There is no indication that Kushner has shared any sensitive or classified material on his private account, or that he relies on his private email account more than his official White House account to conduct government business. Aides say he prefers to call or text over using email.

Still, Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, set up their private family domain late last year before moving to Washington from New York, according to people with knowledge of events as well as publicly available internet registration records. At the time, Kushner — who served as a senior campaign adviser — was expected to be named to a White House role, while Ivanka Trump was publicly saying she didn’t plan to work in her father’s administration.

Kushner's representatives declined to detail the server or security measures on it.

People familiar with the account say it was primarily set up for Kushner’s personal communications, but he has used it to communicate with acquaintances outside the White House about matters relating to Trump and the administration, according to people who have received messages, as well as with his White House colleagues.

Kushner has been under scrutiny in the ongoing Russia probes, which have expanded to include potential obstruction of justice by the president and his aides since January, and Kushner’s private email traffic may also be of interest to FBI and congressional investigators.

Ivanka Trump, now an assistant to the president, has an email account on the same domain, they said. POLITICO has not seen Ivanka Trump’s correspondence, and there is no indication that she used her account to discuss government business.

Private email traffic among White House aides — some of it sent between personal email accounts rather than to or from government addresses — could skirt the requirements of the Presidential Records Act, which requires all documents related to the president’s personal and political activities to be archived. Trump himself is not known to use email but occasionally has email messages to his assistant printed and presented to him.

Lowell said Kushner has adhered to government record-keeping requirements by forwarding all the emails to his account, though POLITICO could not verify that.

Other White House officials have also sometimes used personal accounts to correspond with Kushner and with each other, according to emails seen by POLITICO and people familiar with Kushner’s correspondence. They have also used encrypted apps like Signal and Confide that automatically delete messages, prompting former press secretary Sean Spicer in February to issue a warning to communications staffers that using such apps could violate the Presidential Records Act.

The use of personal email accounts in the Trump White House has been somewhat common, even though the president has been a harsh critic of Clinton’s private email habits, frequently leading “lock her up” chants as he traveled across the country on the campaign trail.

“It was an incredibly effective attack,” said Evan Siegfried, a GOP consultant. “He did a great job of injecting the emails into the mainstream.”

Clinton was the target of an extensive FBI investigation, overseen by former FBI Director James Comey, into whether she mishandled classified material by sending or receiving it via her non-government email address.

In her newly released memoir, Clinton cited the investigation into her email practices as one reason for her defeat. Comey, who in July 2016 formally cleared her of any wrongdoing, reopened the issue in late October, days before the election, after finding a cache of emails backed up on a computer belonging to Anthony Weiner, the husband of Clinton’s top aide Huma Abedin.

The 2016 election was also shaped by the release of hacked emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee as well as from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. The hack is being investigated as part of FBI special counsel Robert Mueller’s wide-ranging probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

A former Obama administration lawyer said aides were asked to not use personal email accounts for official or political business but that occasionally an aide would send a message and later forward it to their account.

If emails related to Trump aren’t saved, it could be difficult for historians, according to Julian Zelizer, a presidential historian at Princeton University. Zelizer said that historians can provide a richer history of how administrations work — and historians have feared for years that the proliferation of email will lead some people to do their business in ways in which the records can’t be archived. Zelizer said it could also make the job more difficult for investigators seeking to understand parts of the White House.

“There’s a reason we require officials to keep those records,” said Zelizer. “Even if 80 percent of someone’s records are not interesting, the other 20 percent can be very illuminating on how an administration worked.”
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/09/2 ... use-243071
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Jared Kushner

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Oct 03, 2017 12:19 pm

Report: Jared and Ivanka Had Third Private Email That Received WH Emails

By NICOLE LAFOND Published OCTOBER 3, 2017 9:45 AM

Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump have used three private email accounts to send and receive emails on matters related to official White House business, Politico reported Monday.

In addition to having their own separate private email accounts, the couple also has a joint account that they both had access to and shared with their personal staff for scheduling purposes, according to three people familiar with the matter who spoke with Politico.

The third account is now being examined by White House officials. The emails sent and received by the account reportedly included the couple’s travel documents, internal White House schedules and some official materials. Many of the emails were sent to the private account through Ivanka Trump’s official White House email address and her assistant Bridges Lamar’s White House account, Politico reported.

The couple has been using the joint email to share work-related “data” on a daily basis since they arrived at the White House, one source said.

The White House is already reviewing the couple’s use of separate private email accounts for some official business. Politico reported in September that other current and former White House staffers used private accounts for government business.

A family representative told Politico that Trump has been careful about separating her personal life from work and that all of her emails have been preserved on her White House account.

A White House spokesperson said the staff had been told to make sure they’re saving emails on their official accounts. Kushner’s lawyer Abbe Lowell said Kushner had sent fewer than 100 emails from his private account and that most exchanges on that server were initiated by the other person.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/j ... -wh-emails


Jared and Ivanka’s secret email addresses are hosted by the Trump Org

Yesterday, Politico reported that Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump had more private email accounts which were set up after the 2016 Presidential election.
Per Politico, Trump’s daughter and son-in-law registered the domain ijkfamily.com to use to handle these email accounts.
According to public domain name records, ijkfamily.com was registered on 31 December 2016, during the height of the Transition and a few weeks before the Presidential inauguration.
When someone buys a .com domain name, they must give their name, address and contact details which are added to a public database. This is called WHOIS data.
The WHOIS data for ijkfamily.com is not accessible. Instead, the entry in the WHOIS register gives the details of Domains by Proxy, a company which exists to hide data from the WHOIS database.
While this might sound sinister, it actually is fairly typical. It costs less than ten dollars to do, and can even be free sometimes. I use similar services for some of the domains I control. I personally don’t read anything into the decision to use a WHOIS proxy.
There is no website for this domain. http://www.ijkfamily.com is just a holding page run by the domain retailer, Godaddy.com. Again, that’s not surprising if the domain was only bought to be used for email.
So where’s the email server?
Here’s where it gets interesting. Different services on the same domain name can be assigned to different servers. So where is the mailserver handing email for ijkfamily.com?
We can find that out by looking up the Mail Exchanger Record (MX) for the domain:
Image
As you can see above, there are two listed mailservers for ijkfamily.com
ijkpph01.ijkfamily.com
ijkpph02.ijkfamily.com
These are the subdomains which deal with an email being sent to, say, jared@ijkfamily.com. Now we need to find out what servers those domains are on. We can do this via an NSLookup to find the Internet Protocol (IP) addresses that those names refer to:
Image
Unsurprisingly, the lookup gave us two sequential IP addresses, 144.121.114.12 and 144.121.114.13 . These addresses probably both go to the same actual server, with two being used for redundancy.
144.121.114.12 and 144.121.114.13 aren’t GoDaddy addresses. Neither of them is running a webserver, so if you paste them into your browser bar then nothing will happen.
Luckily, there are companies who have huge databases of IP addresses and who owns them. One of them, Domaintools, was able to provide the missing piece of the picture.
Image
Image
Yes, 144.121.114.12 and 144.121.114.13 are the addresses for mailhost01.trumporg.com and mailhost02.trumporg.com. These are the mailservers for the Trump Organization. Just to close the loop, I checked this too.
Image
This means that Jared and Ivanka’s private email addresses, set up during the
Transition and used in the White House, were hosted by the Trump Organization.
Obviously this raises a lot more questions about who actually made the domain name and who added the email accounts to the Trump Org’s private mailserver. It raises questions of security and privacy, because Trump Org IT staff would potentially have access to the email accounts. It raises questions of judgement and competence, given how similar this all feels to other, erm, high-profile cases involving private email servers.
I’m sure all those questions will be asked in time.
Journalists who want a better explanation, feel free to contact me.
https://medium.com/@ariehkovler/jared-a ... a6f36a8b39


Exclusive: Jared Kushner's personal email moved to Trump Organization computers amid public scrutiny
Brad Heath, USA TODAY Published 4:48 p.m. ET Oct. 3, 2017 | Updated 4:57 p.m. ET Oct. 3, 2017

A new report reveals Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner have been sending hundreds of emails to an undisclosed private email account. Nathan Rousseau Smith (@FantasticMrNate) has the story. Buzz60

President Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner and daughter Ivanka Trump moved their personal email accounts to computers run by the Trump Organization as public scrutiny intensified over their use of private emails to conduct White House business, internet registration records show.

The move, made just days after Kushner’s use of a personal email account first became public, came shortly after special counsel Robert Mueller asked the White House to turn over records related to his investigation of Russia's interference in the 2016 election and possible collusion with Trump associates. It also more closely intertwines President Trump’s administration with his constellation of private businesses.

Kushner, who is a senior adviser to the president, first faced scrutiny for his private email use on Sept. 24, when his lawyer confirmed that he had occasionally used a personal email account to communicate with other White House officials. Kushner's contacts with Russians during the presidential campaign have drawn the attention of federal investigators.

According to internet registration records reviewed by USA TODAY and cybersecurity researchers, Kushner and his wife Ivanka Trump, who is also a senior adviser, switched the location of their email accounts to a server operated by the Trump Organization on either Sept. 26 or 27, as attention from the media and lawmakers intensified.

The Trump Organization did not respond to questions Tuesday about the email accounts. A lawyer for Kushner and Trump could not be reached for comment.

Last week, the leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is conducting its own investigation of Russian election interference, told Kushner they were “concerned” that they had heard about the emails in news reports instead of from him. The committee had asked him to turn over copies of emails related to the investigation.

The registration records work like street signs – they direct internet traffic to specific computers connected to the network. One set of those records, known as mail exchange records, tells other computers where to send emails addressed to a particular domain.

The internet domain Kushner used for his personal emails was first registered in December. In March, mail exchange records for Kushner and Trump’s family email domain, ijkfamily.com, directed messages to an email system run by Microsoft. The registration was updated at the end of September. Now it points to two mail serversused by the Trump Organization.

USA TODAY reviewed the registration records. Nicholas Weaver, a researcher at the International Computer Science Institute, also reviewed the records and reached the same conclusion. “All indications are these emails are handled by a Trump Organization server,” Weaver said.

Lawyers and cybersecurity researchers said the move was puzzling.

Renato Mariotti, a former federal prosecutor, said that while the emails Kushner and Trump sent and received through their personal accounts could well have been innocuous – locating them on computers run by the Trump Organization “certainly creates the appearance of potential impropriety.”

Mariotti said the move raises questions about who at the Trump-owned company might have access to emails regarding White House business.

The Trump Organization did not respond to questions Tuesday about whether anyone at the company had access to the messages.

Trump, who refused to fully divest from his businesses, resigned from his real estate and branding empire the day before he took office in January. He instead ceded control of the businesses to a revocable trust run for his benefit by two of his sons and a longtime Trump Organization employee. Ivanka Trump and Kushner also separated themselves from their own businesses before taking senior roles in the administration.

Kushner’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, said in a statement last week that Kushner had taken steps to preserve work-related emails from his personal account by forwarding copies to his White House email account.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/pol ... 728467001/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Jared Kushner

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Oct 04, 2017 10:19 am

How Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump, Jr., Avoided a Criminal Indictment

Andrea BernsteinJesse EisingerJustin ElliottIlya Marritz
October 4, 2017 4:00 AM

Photograph by Kris Connor / Getty
In the spring of 2012, Donald Trump’s two eldest children, Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump, Jr., found themselves in a precarious legal position. For two years, prosecutors in the Manhattan District Attorney’s office had been building a criminal case against them for misleading prospective buyers of units in the Trump SoHo, a hotel and condo development that was failing to sell. Despite the best efforts of the siblings’ defense team, the case had not gone away. An indictment seemed like a real possibility. The evidence included e-mails from the Trumps making clear that they were aware they were using inflated figures about how well the condos were selling to lure buyers.

In one e-mail, according to four people who have seen it, the Trumps discussed how to coördinate false information they had given to prospective buyers. In another, according to a person who read the e-mails, they worried that a reporter might be on to them. In yet another, Donald, Jr., spoke reassuringly to a broker who was concerned about the false statements, saying that nobody would ever find out, because only people on the e-mail chain or in the Trump Organization knew about the deception, according to a person who saw the e-mail. There was “no doubt” that the Trump children “approved, knew of, agreed to, and intentionally inflated the numbers to make more sales,” one person who saw the e-mails told us. “They knew it was wrong.”

In 2010, when the Major Economic Crimes Bureau of the D.A.’s office opened an investigation of the siblings, the Trump Organization had hired several top New York criminal-defense lawyers to represent Donald, Jr., and Ivanka. These attorneys had met with prosecutors in the bureau several times. They conceded that their clients had made exaggerated claims, but argued that the overstatements didn’t amount to criminal misconduct. Still, the case dragged on. In a meeting with the defense team, Donald Trump, Sr., expressed frustration that the investigation had not been closed. Soon after, his longtime personal lawyer, Marc Kasowitz, entered the case.


Kasowitz, who by then had been the elder Donald Trump’s attorney for a decade, is primarily a civil litigator, with little experience in criminal matters. But, in 2012, Kasowitz donated twenty-five thousand dollars to the reëlection campaign of the Manhattan District Attorney, Cyrus Vance, Jr., making Kasowitz one of Vance’s largest donors. Kasowitz decided to bypass the lower-level prosecutors and went directly to Vance to ask that the investigation be dropped.

On May 16, 2012, Kasowitz visited Vance’s office at One Hogan Place, in downtown Manhattan—a faded edifice made famous by the television show “Law & Order.” Dan Alonso, the Chief Assistant District Attorney, and Adam Kaufmann, the chief of the investigative division, were also at the meeting, but no one from the Major Economic Crimes Bureau attended. Kasowitz did not introduce any new arguments or facts during his session. He simply repeated the arguments that the other defense lawyers had been making for months.

Ultimately, Vance overruled his own prosecutors. Three months after the meeting, he told them to drop the case. Kasowitz subsequently boasted to colleagues about representing the Trump children, according to two people. He said that the case was “really dangerous,” one person said, and that it was “amazing I got them off.” (Kasowitz denied making such a statement.)

Vance defended his decision. “I did not at the time believe beyond a reasonable doubt that a crime had been committed,” he told us. “I had to make a call and I made the call, and I think I made the right call.”

Just before the 2012 meeting, Vance’s campaign had returned Kasowitz’s twenty-five-thousand-dollar contribution, in keeping with what Vance describes as standard practice when a donor has a case before his office. Kasowitz “had no influence, and his contributions had no influence whatsoever on my decision-making in the case,” Vance said.

But, less than six months after the D.A.’s office dropped the case, Kasowitz made an even larger donation to Vance’s campaign, and helped raise more from others—eventually, a total of more than fifty thousand dollars. After being asked about these donations as part of the reporting for this article—more than four years after the fact—Vance said he now plans to give back Kasowitz’s second contribution, too. “I don’t want the money to be a millstone around anybody’s neck, including the office’s,” he said.

Kasowitz told us that his donations to Vance were unrelated to the case. “I donated to Cy Vance’s campaign because I was and remain extremely impressed by him as a person of impeccable integrity, as a brilliant lawyer and as a public servant with creative ideas and tremendous ability,” Kasowitz wrote in an e-mailed statement. “I have never made a contribution to anyone’s campaign, including Cy Vance’s, as a ‘quid-pro-quo’ for anything.”

Last year, the Times reported the existence of the criminal investigation into the Trump SoHo project. But the prosecutor’s focus on Ivanka and Donald, Jr., and the e-mail evidence against them, as well as Kasowitz’s involvement, and Vance’s decision to overrule his prosecutors, had not previously been made public. This account is based on interviews with twenty sources familiar with the investigation, court records, and other public documents. We were not able to review copies of the e-mails that were the focal point of the inquiry. We are relying on the accounts of multiple individuals who have seen them.

Requests for interviews with Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump, Jr., were referred to Alan Garten, the chief legal officer of the Trump Organization. In an e-mailed response, Garten did not address a list of questions about the criminal case. Instead, he quoted the company’s filings in civil litigation relating to the Trump SoHo, which described complaints as “a simple case of buyers’ remorse.”

But even a lawyer in the Trump camp acknowledged that the way the case was resolved was unusual. “Dropping the case was reasonable,” Paul Grand, a partner at Morvillo Abramowitz who was part of the Trump SoHo defense team, said. “The manner in which it was accomplished is curious.”

Grand, who was a partner of Vance’s when the District Attorney was in private practice, said that he did not believe that the D.A.’s office had evidence of criminal misconduct by the Trump children. But the meeting between Vance and Kasowitz “didn’t have an air you’d like,” he said. “If you and I were District Attorney and you knew that a subject of an investigation was represented by two or three well-thought-of lawyers in town, and all of a sudden someone who was a contributor to your campaign showed up on your doorstep, and the regular lawyers are nowhere to be seen, you’d think about how you’d want to proceed.”

In June, 2006, during the season finale of “The Apprentice,” Donald Trump, Sr., unveiled the Trump SoHo as a visionary project. The luxury development was intended to mark the ascension of Ivanka and Donald, Jr.,—then twenty-four and twenty-eight years old, respectively—as full players in the Trump empire. They signed the licensing deal alongside their father, and photographs of Ivanka were featured in the Trump SoHo’s advertising, under the tagline “Possess your own SoHo.”

Their partners on the project included two Soviet-born businessmen, Felix Sater and Tevfik Arif, who ran the Bayrock Group, a real-estate-development firm. Sater had a history of running afoul of the law. In 1993, he was convicted of assault and spent about a year in prison for attacking a man with the stem of a margarita glass in a bar fight. In 1998, he pleaded guilty to one count of racketeering for his role in a forty-million-dollar securities-fraud scheme.

The Trump SoHo was beleaguered from the start: named for one of Manhattan’s trendiest neighborhoods, the development wasn’t really in SoHo but located just west of it, near the entrance ramp to the Holland Tunnel. Zoning laws wouldn’t allow a residential tower at the location, so the Trumps fell back on an alternative: a “condo-hotel,” in which buyers got a hotel room rather than an apartment, and were legally prohibited from staying there more than a hundred and twenty nights per year. Worse, the high-priced condos hit the market in September, 2007, just as the global economy began to crater in what became the largest financial crisis since the Great Depression.

Business was slow, but the Trump family claimed the opposite. In April, 2008, they said that thirty-one per cent of the condos in the building had been purchased. Donald, Jr., boasted to The Real Deal magazine that fifty-five per cent of the units had been bought. In June, 2008, Donald, Jr., and Ivanka, alongside their brother Eric, gathered the foreign press at Trump Tower in Manhattan, where Ivanka announced that sixty per cent had been snapped up. “We’re in a very fortunate position where we have enough sales, and now we are strategically targeting certain buyers,” she said.

None of that was true. According to a sworn affidavit by a Trump partner filed with the New York Attorney General’s office, by March of 2010, almost two years after the press conference, only 15.8 per cent of units had been sold.

This was more than a marketing problem. The deal hinged on selling at least fifteen per cent of the units. By law, the sales couldn’t close with anything less. The Trumps and their partners would have had to return the buyers’ down payments.

Some buyers concluded that they’d been cheated. In August, 2010, some sued the Trump Organization and others involved in the project in New York federal court. “This action seeks to redress the substantial and ongoing pattern of fraudulent misrepresentations and deceptive sales practices” by the Trumps and the other defendants, the suit charged. The plaintiffs argued that there’s a vast difference in value between a unit in a building that is fifteen-per-cent sold and one that is sixty-per-cent sold. Their complaint accused the sellers, including the Trumps, of “a consistent and concerted pattern of outright lies.”

After the civil suit was filed, the Manhattan District Attorney’s office opened a criminal investigation. Prosecutors are often wary of getting involved in a dispute between wealthy litigants. But, in this instance, according to a person familiar with their thinking, the lawyers in the Major Economic Crimes Bureau quickly concluded that there was enough to warrant an investigation. They believed that Ivanka and Donald, Jr., might have violated the Martin Act, a New York statute that bans any false statement in conjunction with the sale of a security or real estate. Prosecutors also saw potential fraud and larceny charges, applying a legal theory that, by overstating the number of units sold, the Trump were falsely inflating their value and, in effect, cheating unsuspecting condo buyers.

Peirce Moser, an Assistant District Attorney known for his methodical, comprehensive investigations, soon took over the case. “He is not a cowboy,” Marc Scholl, who spent almost forty years as a prosecutor in the District Attorney’s office, said. “He is certainly not out to make headlines for himself or to advance himself.”

On the other side, the Trumps’ defense team included Gary Naftalis and David Frankel, of the law firm Kramer Levin; Paul Grand represented one of the real-estate brokers who had worked with the Trumps.

As the investigation progressed, Vance suffered an embarrassing setback in one of his highest-profile cases. In the summer of 2011, his office had abandoned a sexual-assault case against the former managing director of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Vance, who was pummelled in the press afterward, denied in his interview with us that the case made him reluctant to take on another prominent defendant.

A few months later, on January 11, 2012, Marc Kasowitz contributed twenty-five thousand dollars to Vance’s campaign, unbeknownst to prosecutors in the Major Economic Crimes Bureau, who continued their work. Moser was particularly focused on e-mail correspondence, according to seven people familiar with the case.

Moser began considering impanelling a special grand jury, according to a person familiar with the investigation. That would have represented a significant escalation in the case, because it is often a prelude to indictments. With a grand jury in place, defense lawyers knew the risk of indictment was high.

The defense team offered a deal to stave off this possibility, floating the possibility of a settlement of some kind, including a deferred prosecution agreement, which would have meant the corporate equivalent of probation for the Trump Organization. With the investigation appearing to gather momentum, Naftalis and Grand, who had already met with the prosecutors twice, began to step up their campaign against the case. Grand calls this the “internal appellate process.” Particularly when well-heeled or high-profile defendants are involved, there can be a multi-month advocacy process that slowly makes its way up the hierarchy inside the Manhattan D.A.’s office.

Grand and Naftalis decided that it would be unwise to go over the heads of the staff prosecutors. Instead, on April 18, 2012, they sent a letter to Adam Kaufmann, then the chief of the investigative division (he’s now in private practice), outlining their arguments. The next day, the defense lawyers met with Moser, Kaufmann, and others from the prosecution team. The defense team acknowledged that the Trumps made some exaggerated statements in order to sell the units. But this was mere “puffery”—harmless exaggeration. Such language, they contended, didn’t amount to criminal conduct. The Trumps weren’t selling useless swampland in Florida. The condos existed. And the buyers’ money was in escrow the entire time.

The defense lawyers argued that bringing such a case to trial would be wasteful and that resources would be better spent on more serious offenses. As Grand put it to us during our recent interview, “I guess in a world that is completely pure and where there is no deviation between propriety and the law, that kind of exaggeration and deliberately concentrated exaggeration can be pursued. But is that the kind of criminal-law enforcement the D.A. should be doing?”

Moser’s answer seemed to be yes, and he found support among his supervisors. Moser had prepared an elaborate PowerPoint presentation, featuring dozens of e-mails that prosecutors believed showed that Ivanka and Donald, Jr., had repeatedly lied to buyers. “You couldn’t have had a better e-mail trail,” a person familiar with the investigation told us.

At the meeting, Kaufmann peppered the defense team with questions, at one point raising his voice, according to a person who was there. “I believed in the case,” Kaufmann told us, though he declined to discuss the evidence. “But believing in the case doesn’t mean we had reached the point when [I had] settled on what should happen with the case.”

White-collar criminal cases are often challenging to bring because of their complexity. And, by the time of the April meeting, prosecutors knew that they faced another impediment, this one created by legal maneuvers in the Trumps’ civil case. Five months earlier, the Trumps and their partners had reached a settlement with the disgruntled buyers. The defendants agreed to return ninety per cent of the buyers’ deposits, plus their attorneys’ fees. But they extracted a rare concession in return: the plaintiffs agreed not to coöperate with prosecutors unless they were subpoenaed. (Garten, the Trump Organization’s chief legal officer, noted that the settlement terms were confidential and declined to comment on them.)

Adam Leitman Bailey, the attorney for the buyers, had been helping prosecutors. Now he provided aid to the Trumps, writing a letter to the District Attorney that stated, “We acknowledge that the Defendants have not violated the criminal laws of the State of New York or the United States.” In our interview with Vance, he said that he had never before seen a letter where plaintiffs in a civil case asserted that no crime had been committed. “I don’t think I’d ever received a letter like it,” Vance said. He calls it a “significant and important” communication.

Certainly, prosecutors could subpoena the buyers of Trump condos. But they feared the witnesses would undercut the criminal case by claiming they weren’t victims of a fraud.

Still, Moser, backed by his supervisors, persisted. “Peirce believed in his case,” Grand said. “We did not succeed in talking him out of it and didn’t succeed in talking one or two levels above him into dropping the case.”

Finally, in the spring of 2012, Kasowitz joined the case. His involvement “came from out of the blue,” Grand told us. He and the other lawyers assumed Kasowitz intervened at the request of Donald Trump, Sr.

In early May, 2012, Kasowitz asked to see the District Attorney. Vance told us that such meetings aren’t unusual—but his investigations chief at the time, Kaufmann, characterized Kasowitz’s request as “a little premature.” The Trump lawyer was going over the heads of everyone who had been working on the case. The gathering, on May 16th, lasted twenty to thirty minutes, according to Vance. Kasowitz repeated the arguments the defense team had made before.

Afterward, Kasowitz didn’t seem to think his clients were in the clear. On August 1st, he suggested a settlement, proposing that the Trump Organization would not admit to wrongdoing but would agree not to mislead people in the future and would submit to outside monitoring. The offer proved unnecessary. Two days later, on August 3, 2012, Moser called the Trumps’ defense attorneys and told them that prosecutors were dropping the investigation. (Moser, who still works for Vance, now as senior investigative counsel, did not respond to requests for an interview made over multiple months. Shortly before this article was published, he sent an e-mail stating that Vance’s ultimate decision in the case “was not unreasonable” and that, throughout the process, the D.A. asked “smart questions” and expressed “reasonable skepticism.”)

In his interview, Vance defended his decision to drop the case with no conditions, even after Kasowitz offered a deal. “This started as a civil case,” Vance said. “It was settled as a civil case with a statement by the purchasers of luxury properties that they weren’t victims. And, at the end of the day, I felt if we were not going to charge criminally, we should leave it as a civil case in the posture in which it came to us.”

In September, 2012, within weeks of the case being resolved, Kasowitz contacted Vance’s campaign about hosting a fund-raiser, according to a spokesperson for the campaign. Kasowitz held the event that January. He personally donated almost thirty-two thousand dollars to Vance’s campaign, and twenty of his law firm’s partners and employees kicked in at least another nine thousand dollars. Then, in October, 2013, as Election Day approached, he hosted a breakfast for Republicans for Cy Vance, which raised an additional nine thousand dollars.

Vance defended his decision to accept the money Kasowitz sent his way. “We did the right thing,” he said, referring to the decision to drop the case. “Another five and a half months go by. Marc Kasowitz has no matter pending before the office for the Trumps or anybody else. It’s 2013 and it’s an election—and I welcome his support.” Vance noted that New York law allowed him to accept such a contribution. Still, he now intends to return the money to Kasowitz.

Ivanka Trump is now an adviser to the President, with an office in the West Wing. Donald, Jr., is running much of the family empire while his father is in the White House. Kasowitz attained national prominence when he was retained to represent the President in the Russia investigation, only to be supplanted as lead counsel. Vance is running unopposed for reëlection in November. The Trump SoHo went into foreclosure in 2014 and was taken over by a creditor. Only a hundred and twenty-eight of the three hundred and ninety-one units in the building have sold. That comes out to around thirty-three per cent.
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Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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