kushner, jared

=see KUSHNER 2 for newer220 tag kshnrpow, evil pendingreportedly short-list for cos=ivanka test jan 6 comm? so did he? out of cty /ME ?<div>=</div><div>wolff bk</div><div><p class="dcr-xry7m2" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-ligatures: common-ligatures; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.5; vertical-align: baseline; word-break: break-word; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">...<h2 style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-ligatures: common-ligatures; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-size: 1.25rem; line-height: 1.15; font-family: "GH Guardian Headline", "Guardian Egyptian Web", Georgia, serif; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(18, 18, 18); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-size: inherit; line-height: inherit; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">infighting</h2><p class="dcr-xry7m2" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-ligatures: common-ligatures; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.5; font-family: GuardianTextEgyptian, "Guardian Text Egyptian Web", Georgia, serif; vertical-align: baseline; word-break: break-word; color: rgb(18, 18, 18); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Trump’s response to Mueller is at the heart of the extensively quoted derision from staff members about the president’s mental state; the president himself is quoted deriding everyone around him, sons – known to White House staff as “Uday and Qusay”, after Saddam Hussein’s offspring – and daughter included.<p class="dcr-xry7m2" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-ligatures: common-ligatures; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.5; font-family: GuardianTextEgyptian, "Guardian Text Egyptian Web", Georgia, serif; vertical-align: baseline; word-break: break-word; color: rgb(18, 18, 18); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“There was now a fair amount of back-of-the-classroom giggling about who had called Trump what,” Wolff writes. “For [the treasury secretary] Steve Mnuchin and [the former chief of staff] Reince Priebus he was an ‘idiot’. For [the economic adviser] Gary Cohn, he was ‘dumb as shit’. For [national security adviser] HR McMaster, he was a ‘dope’. The list went on.”<p class="dcr-xry7m2" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-ligatures: common-ligatures; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.5; font-family: GuardianTextEgyptian, "Guardian Text Egyptian Web", Georgia, serif; vertical-align: baseline; word-break: break-word; color: rgb(18, 18, 18); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Bannon is ranged against Kushner and Ivanka and in the words of Richard Nixon’s adviser Henry Kissinger: “It is a war between the Jews and the non-Jews.”<p class="dcr-xry7m2" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-ligatures: common-ligatures; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-size: 1.0625rem; line-height: 1.5; font-family: GuardianTextEgyptian, "Guardian Text Egyptian Web", Georgia, serif; vertical-align: baseline; word-break: break-word; color: rgb(18, 18, 18);">It seems perhaps the most hated entity is “Jarvanka”, AKA Kushner and Ivanka Trump. Wolff also writes that the couple had a much-mocked deal: that “the first woman president … would not be Hillary Clinton; it would be Ivanka Trump.”<div>=</div></div><div>=</div><div>4 22 an</div><div>after his father-in-law left the White House, Jared Kushner got a $2 billion golden parachute—from the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. Kushner predictably started a private equity firm despite his lack of experience in private equity, and went to the main Saudi sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund (PIF), asking for an “investment.”The professionals in charge of screening possible investments for the PIF raised a series of objections only to be overruled days later by the fund’s board, which is led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, with whom Kushner became close during his time as a senior White House adviser.The objections to investing in Kushner’s private equity firm, Affinity Partners, included “’the inexperience of the Affinity Fund management’; the possibility that the kingdom would be responsible for ‘the bulk of the investment and risk’; due diligence on the fledgling firm’s operations that found them ‘unsatisfactory in all aspects’; a proposed asset management fee that ‘seems excessive’; and ‘public relations risks’ from Mr. Kushner’s prior role as a senior adviser to his father-in-law, former President Donald J. Trump, according to minutes of the panel’s meeting last June 30,” <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/10/us/jared-kushner-saudi-investment-fund.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">The New York Times reports</a>.The reason given internally was that Kushner was worth the risk despite his inexperience and potential public relations problems, in order to “capitalize on the capabilities of Affinity’s founders’ deep understanding of different government policies and geopolitical systems.” That’s a lot of words when you could just say “buying access and influence.”As a measure of how much the eventual bin Salman-led decision to hand over $2 billion to Kushner was driven by relationships, Steven Mnuchin, the former Trump treasury secretary, also started a private equity firm and went to Saudi Arabia asking for money. He got $1 billion despite having relevant experience in the field. Kushner is also getting a higher asset management fee from the PIF than Mnuchin is.Few other investors have bought what Kushner was selling. According to public filings, the main fund at Affinity Partners had just $2.5 billion invested. It sounds like he’s basically owned by Saudi Arabia at this point. But then, he did a lot to earn this kind of loyalty when he was in a position to do so.In a side note on the brokenness of the traditional media, check out this framing: “Ethics experts say that such a deal creates the appearance of potential payback for Mr. Kushner’s actions in the White House — or of a bid for future favor if Mr. Trump seeks and wins another presidential term in 2024.”Guys. You really don’t need ethics experts to tell you that. Everyone can see it. Nor do you need to include the waffling “the appearance of.” It’s blatantly corrupt, even if we don’t know if it’s more of a thank you for Jared’s help providing cover on the murder and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, or more of a down payment on future services should Trump make it back to the White House. And it’s business as usual for all of Team Trump.</div><div>=</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">=</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/19/business/deutsche-bank-trump-kushner.html">https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/19/business/deutsche-bank-trump-kushner.html</a></div><div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Deutsche Bank Staff Saw Suspicious Activity in Trump and Kushner Accounts</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Tammy McFadden, a former Deutsche Bank employee, saw potentially suspicious transactions involving the company of Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, she said.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Tammy McFadden, a former Deutsche Bank employee, saw potentially suspicious transactions involving the company of Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, she said.Credit...Willie J. Allen Jr. for The New York Times</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">By David Enrich</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">May 19, 2019</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Anti-money-laundering specialists at Deutsche Bank recommended in 2016 and 2017 that multiple transactions involving legal entities controlled by Donald J. Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, be reported to a federal financial-crimes watchdog.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The transactions, some of which involved Mr. Trump’s now-defunct foundation, set off alerts in a computer system designed to detect illicit activity, according to five current and former bank employees. Compliance staff members who then reviewed the transactions prepared so-called suspicious activity reports that they believed should be sent to a unit of the Treasury Department that polices financial crimes.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">But executives at Deutsche Bank, which has lent billions of dollars to the Trump and Kushner companies, rejected their employees’ advice. The reports were never filed with the government.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The nature of the transactions was not clear. At least some of them involved money flowing back and forth with overseas entities or individuals, which bank employees considered suspicious.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Real estate developers like Mr. Trump and Mr. Kushner sometimes do large, all-cash deals, including with people outside the United States, any of which can prompt anti-money laundering reviews. The red flags raised by employees do not necessarily mean the transactions were improper. Banks sometimes opt not to file suspicious activity reports if they conclude their employees’ concerns are unwarranted.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">But former Deutsche Bank employees said the decision not to report the Trump and Kushner transactions reflected the bank’s generally lax approach to money laundering laws. The employees — most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve their ability to work in the industry — said it was part of a pattern of the bank’s executives rejecting valid reports to protect relationships with lucrative clients.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“You present them with everything, and you give them a recommendation, and nothing happens,” said Tammy McFadden, a former Deutsche Bank anti-money laundering specialist who reviewed some of the transactions. “It’s the D.B. way. They are prone to discounting everything.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Ms. McFadden said she was terminated last year after she raised concerns about the bank’s practices. Since then, she has filed complaints with the Securities and Exchange Commission and other regulators about the bank’s anti-money-laundering enforcement.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Kerrie McHugh, a Deutsche Bank spokeswoman, said the company had intensified its efforts to combat financial crime. An effective anti-money laundering program, she said, “requires sophisticated transaction screening technology as well as a trained group of individuals who can analyze the alerts generated by that technology both thoroughly and efficiently.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“At no time was an investigator prevented from escalating activity identified as potentially suspicious,” she added. “Furthermore, the suggestion that anyone was reassigned or fired in an effort to quash concerns relating to any client is categorically false.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Amanda Miller, a spokeswoman for the Trump Organization, the umbrella company for the Trump family’s many business interests, said: “We have no knowledge of any ‘flagged’ transactions with Deutsche Bank.” She said the Trump Organization currently has “no operating accounts with Deutsche Bank.” She did not respond when asked if other Trump entities had accounts.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Karen Zabarsky, a spokeswoman for Kushner Companies, said: “Any allegations regarding Deutsche Bank’s relationship with Kushner Companies which involved money laundering is completely made up and totally false. The New York Times continues to create dots that just don’t connect.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Deutsche Bank’s decision not to report the transactions is the latest twist in Mr. Trump’s long, complicated relationship with the German bank — the only mainstream financial institution consistently willing to do business with the real estate developer.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Congressional and state authorities are investigating that relationship and have demanded the bank’s records related to the president, his family and their companies. Subpoenas from two House committees seek, among other things, documents related to any suspicious activities detected in Mr. Trump’s personal and business bank accounts since 2010, according to a copy of a subpoena included in a federal court filing.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Mr. Trump and his family sued Deutsche Bank in April, seeking to block it from complying with the congressional subpoenas. The president’s lawyers described the subpoenas as politically motivated.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Suspicious activity reports are at the heart of the federal government’s efforts to identify criminal activity like money laundering and sanctions violations. But government regulations give banks leeway in selecting which transactions to report to the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Lenders typically use a layered approach to detect improper activity. The first step is filtering thousands of transactions using computer programs, which send the ones considered potentially suspicious to midlevel employees for a detailed review. Those employees can decide whether to draft a suspicious activity report, but a final ruling on whether to submit it to the Treasury Department is often made by more senior managers.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In the summer of 2016, Deutsche Bank’s software flagged a series of transactions involving the real estate company of Mr. Kushner, now a senior White House adviser.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Ms. McFadden, a longtime anti-money laundering specialist in Deutsche Bank’s Jacksonville office, said she had reviewed the transactions and found that money had moved from Kushner Companies to Russian individuals. She concluded that the transactions should be reported to the government — in part because federal regulators had ordered Deutsche Bank, which had been caught laundering billions of dollars for Russians, to toughen its scrutiny of potentially illegal transactions.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Ms. McFadden drafted a suspicious activity report and compiled a small bundle of documents to back up her decision.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Tracking 30 Investigations Related to Trump</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Federal, state and congressional authorities are investigating Donald J. Trump’s businesses, campaign, inauguration and presidency.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Typically, such a report would be reviewed by a team of anti-money laundering experts who are independent of the business line in which the transactions originated — in this case, the private-banking division — according to Ms. McFadden and two former Deutsche Bank managers.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">That did not happen with this report. It went to managers in New York who were part of the private bank, which caters to the ultrawealthy. They felt Ms. McFadden’s concerns were unfounded and opted not to submit the report to the government, the employees said.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Ms. McFadden and some of her colleagues said they believed the report had been killed to maintain the private-banking division’s strong relationship with Mr. Kushner.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">After Mr. Trump became president, transactions involving him and his companies were reviewed by an anti-financial crime team at the bank called the Special Investigations Unit. That team, based in Jacksonville, produced multiple suspicious activity reports involving different entities that Mr. Trump owned or controlled, according to three former Deutsche Bank employees who saw the reports in an internal computer system.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Some of those reports involved Mr. Trump’s limited liability companies. At least one was related to transactions involving the Donald J. Trump Foundation, two employees said.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div>Deutsche Bank ultimately chose not to file those suspicious activity reports with the Treasury Department, either, according to three former employees. They said it was unusual for the bank to reject a series of reports involving the same high-profile client.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Mr. Trump’s relationship with Deutsche Bank spans two decades. During a period when most Wall Street banks had stopped doing business with him after his repeated defaults, Deutsche Bank lent Mr. Trump and his companies a total of more than $2.5 billion. Projects financed through the private-banking division include Mr. Trump’s Doral golf resort near Miami and his transformation of Washington’s Old Post Office Building into a luxury hotel.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div>When he became president, he owed Deutsche Bank well over $300 million. That made the German institution Mr. Trump’s biggest creditor — and put the bank in a bind.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Senior executives worried that if they took a tough stance with Mr. Trump’s accounts — for example, by demanding payment of a delinquent loan — they could provoke the president’s wrath. On the other hand, if they didn’t do anything, the bank could be perceived as cutting a lucrative break for Mr. Trump, whose administration wields regulatory and law enforcement power over the bank.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In the past few years, United States and European authorities have punished Deutsche Bank for helping clients, including wealthy Russians, launder funds and for moving money into countries like Iran in violation of American sanctions. The bank has paid hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties and is operating under a Federal Reserve order that requires it to do more to stop illicit activities.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">On two palm-tree-lined campuses in Jacksonville, Deutsche Bank has thousands of employees who vet customers and transactions. Six current and former bank employees there said the operations were deeply troubled.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Anti-money laundering workers were pressured to quickly sift through transactions to assess whether they were suspicious, the employees said. As a result, they often erred on the side of not flagging transactions.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Two former employees said that they had raised concerns about transactions involving companies linked to prominent Russians, but that managers had told them not to file suspicious activity reports. The employees were under the impression that the bank did not want to upset important clients.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Several employees said they had complained about the bank’s anti-money laundering processes to Joshua Blazer, the head of Deutsche Bank’s financial crimes investigations division in Jacksonville, and had then been criticized for having a negative attitude. One employee said she resigned last summer over concerns about the bank’s ethics.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Mr. Blazer, hired by Deutsche Bank in 2017 to strengthen the bank’s financial crime-fighting apparatus, declined to comment.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Ms. McFadden’s job at Deutsche Bank was to inspect clients and transactions in the company’s private-banking division — the unit that lent money to Mr. Trump. She joined the bank in 2008, after working for Bank of America, also in Jacksonville.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Ms. McFadden had left Bank of America in 2005, and later sued for racial discrimination and wrongful termination. According to court records, her lawsuit was settled on confidential terms the same year she joined Deutsche Bank, where she went on to win multiple performance awards.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div>Around the time she flagged the Kushner Companies’ transactions, Ms. McFadden said, she also complained about how the bank was scrutinizing the accounts of high-profile customers, such as those in public office. Those customers — known as politically exposed persons — are regarded as at heightened risk of being involved in corruption. As a result, their accounts are subject to extra vetting.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Ms. McFadden said she had told her superiors that dozens of politically exposed clients of the private-banking division, including Mr. Trump and members of his family, were not receiving that added attention. Her superiors told her to stop raising questions, according to Ms. McFadden and the two former managers.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">After taking her complaint to the human resources department, Ms. McFadden was transferred to another division. She was terminated in April 2018. The bank told her that she was not processing enough transactions.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Ms. McFadden disputed that. She said her superiors had reduced the number of transactions she was assigned to review after she voiced her concerns. She and the two former managers said they perceived her termination as an act of retaliation.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“They attempted to try to silence me,” she said. “I’m at peace because I know that I did the right thing.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/heres-why-congress-wants-to-look-inside-the-bank-that-fronted-donald-trump-2-billion/">https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/heres-why-congress-wants-to-look-inside-the-bank-that-fronted-donald-trump-2-billion/</a></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">no lnx</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Here’s why Congress wants to look inside the bank that fronted Donald Trump $2 billion</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Written by Dana Kennedy / Raw Story, DC Report December 31, 2019</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div>Just try phoning Trump’s private banker Rosemary T. Vrablic at Deutsche Bank’s U.S. headquarters in Manhattan. Back in 2017, before too many bankers involved with Deutsche Bank started turning up dead, Trump once dared reporters to call her, saying she was the “the head” of the bank and “the boss.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The good news is that Vrablic, 58, is alive. That is not something to take for granted when you look at two dead Deutsche Bank executives with ties to Trump, Russia and possibly at dead pedophile money man Jeffrey Epstein. One banker was found hanged in 2014 and one in November.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Vrablic’s office picked up right away when this reporter called following the Supreme Court’s decision on Dec. 13 to take up Trump’s argument that he be allowed to shield disclosure of his financial information from Congress and the New York attorney general.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div>Not surprisingly, the woman who answered the phone in Vrablic’s office refused to identify herself. Nor would she put Vrablic on to answer questions about Trump.</div><div>
</div><div>She sounded flabbergasted that anyone from the public, much less the media, would be calling someone who is, for the most part, a mystery woman. And that is despite her role in approving about $300 million in allegedly suspect loans to Trump. That arrangement will be part of a quite likely historic oral argument by the Supreme Court in March with a planned June decision.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Refusing to transfer the call to a corporate spokesperson, the person who answered the phone tried to imply that Vrablic no longer worked there. Then she agreed to take a message that was never returned.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">‘Global Laundromat’</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div>Deutsche Bank lent Trump millions after he defaulted on loans they already gave him and after he once sued them in 2008. Known derisively as a “global laundromat,” the bank is facing U.S. and British legal actions over its role in a $20 billion Russian money-laundering scheme. Two Congressional committees want the bank to release 10-plus years of records involving Trump and his three oldest children as Congress probes Russian money laundering and possible foreign influence involving Trump. White House lawyers have fought the committees tenaciously.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">It’s hoped that the Supreme Court’s verdict will end years-long efforts on the part of U.S. officials to glean the truth about Trump’s finances. Especially at issue is whether Russians interfered in the 2016 election and if that meddling was powered by Russian money funneled to Trump through the giant, scandal-ridden German bank.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Teller to Managing Director</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Vrablic, a one-time bank teller turned Deutsche Bank private wealth managing director, was Trump’s liaison at the bank. She sat in a hoodie in the VIP section at the Trump inauguration.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Trump borrowed more than $2 billion in the past two decades. Many allege the loans could hold the key to Russian funding of Trump.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Hired in 2006 with celebratory ads in The New York Times and a sweet deal guaranteeing her $3 million a year, Vrablic’s work raised the bank’s public profile–at first in a good way. Now the opposite is true.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Trump burned through his relationships with bank investment and commercial real estate departments because of his constant defaults and failures. Then Vrablic stepped up in 2010.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The Kushner Network</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div>Trump’s daughter Ivanka had just married Jared Kushner, who was a longtime client of Vrablic along with his mother Seryl. Ivanka steered Vrablic in the private bank sector of Deutsche Bank her father’s way. It turned out to be the financial lifeline crucial in helping him win the election.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">People at Vrablic’s level in the banking world, even when they are swept up in such international scandals, are rarely household names unless they die suddenly… read suspiciously. Even then, they are familiar to only the most inside-baseball financial journalists. They are never part of the daily Trump-Schiff-Pelosi-Schumer-AOC-Nunes-McConnell etc. political narrative though their influence is often greater.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Their deaths often remain murky. Supposed details take on a life of their own on conspiracy websites but the actual truth remains frustratingly out of reach – a bit like Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged jail suicide.</div><div>
</div><div>A Pair of Suicides</div><div>
</div><div>Thomas Bowers, 55, Vrablic’s former boss, ran the private wealth division of Deutsche Bank and oversaw loans to Trump and reportedly to Epstein until he left the bank, reportedly in 2015. It is said he hanged himself at his Malibu home on Nov. 19.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">His death was first reported in a tweet by David Enrich of The New York Times, one of the foremost experts on Deutsche Bank. “Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump and an Epic Trail of Destruction,” an upcoming book by Enrich, focuses in part on the sudden death of William Broeksmit, a senior Deutsche Bank executive.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div>Broeksmit, a man who “knew too much,” according to Enrich, was found hanging in his London home in 2014. Enrich calls it a “mysterious suicide.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Enrich previewed the deeply weird story of the whistleblower in the Broeksmit case, who turns out to be the troubled but possibly believable stepson of Broeksmit, in a New York Times Magazine story in October. So far, though, he has done no more than tweet about Bowers, first to announce his death, then to deny “rumors” that Bowers had been Epstein’s banker.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The Epstein Connection</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div>Enrich said on Twitter that Bowers left Deutsche Bank in 2013, prior to Epstein becoming a client. Deutsche Bank would not comment on Bowers and other reports say Bowers left Deutsche Bank in 2015 when Epstein was already a customer.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div>Epstein, of course, allegedly committed suicide while in jail in August. One of Estonia’s leading bankers, Aivar Rehe, apparently committed suicide in September in Tallinn. Rehe ran Danske Bank which was used by clients in Russia and Eastern Europe to launder billions of dirty dollars. At the time of the Rehe death, Frankfurt prosecutors were eyeballing Deutsche Bank for its part in doing business with suspicious American customers, The New York Times reported.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The Democratic-controlled House Financial Services and Intelligence Committees issued subpoenas to Deutsche Bank in April for the records. In turn, Trump sued the bank to prevent it from complying. It’s believed that the bank has documents that would show on how Trump made his money, who he partnered with and extensive details of what he borrowed and resulting transactions.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The subpoenas also included demands for information about suspicious activity in Trump’s Deutsche Bank accounts.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Trump’s Lender of Last Resort</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Starting in the late 1990s, Trump had become such a bad credit risk, either repeatedly defaulting on loans or declaring bankruptcy, that no U.S. banks would do business with him.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Deutsche Bank, which badly wanted to expand internationally, especially into the United States, saw an opportunity with Trump and became his chief creditor, despite his rank financial past.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Anti-money-laundering investigators at Deutsche Bank flagged “multiple transactions” involving accounts controlled by Trump and Jared Kushner in 2016 and 2017 and alerted bank executives who apparently ignored the intel, The New York Times reported in May.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“You present them with everything, and you give them a recommendation, and nothing happens,” Tammy McFadden, a former Deutsche Bank anti-money laundering specialist who reviewed some of the transactions told The Times.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“It’s the D.B. way. They are prone to discounting everything.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Additional reporting by Matthew Reagan and Anna Sasser, Occidental College, Los Angeles</div></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"></div><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/ryan-lizza/how-jared-kushner-helped-the-russians-get-inside-access-to-the-trump-campaign">https://www.newyorker.com/news/ryan-lizza/how-jared-kushner-helped-the-russians-get-inside-access-to-the-trump-campaign</a>no lnx
How Jared Kushner Helped the Russians Get Inside Access to the Trump Campaign
By Ryan Lizza July 25, 2017
Jared Kushner’s testimony reveals a campaign and Presidential transition that were remarkably easy targets for Russian intelligence efforts.Photograph by Yuri Gripas / AFP / GettyIf you read Jared Kushner’s statement to congressional committees looking for evidence of a crime, there isn’t much there. But if you read it from the perspective of the Russians trying to gain a toehold—or more—inside the Trump campaign, you realize how easy he made it for them. As the evidence mounted last year that the Russian government launched an unprecedented hacking and influence campaign to affect the 2016 election in Donald Trump’s favor, the Trump team, including Kushner, became increasingly more solicitous to high-level Russians offering information and requesting meetings.
Kushner’s first meeting with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian Ambassador to the United States, seems relatively innocuous. According to Kushner’s account, they met in April, 2016, at the Mayflower Hotel, in Washington, D.C., during a reception before a speech that Trump delivered on foreign policy. Dimitri Simes, the publisher of The National Interest and the organizer of the event, introduced Kushner to Kislyak and three other ambassadors. To Kushner, the introduction was forgettable. Without specifying which ones, he noted that some of the ambassadors invited him to lunch but that he “never took them up on any of these invitations.”
For Kislyak, it was clearly an important moment. The Russian Ambassador represents a country whose intelligence services had hacked their way into the Democratic National Committee’s networks ten months earlier and hacked the e-mail account of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, the previous month. At Trump’s speech, Kislyak was honored with an invitation to the reception and a front-row seat. Trump’s speech itself extended an olive branch to Vladimir Putin, calling for “improved relations with Russia” and an effort to “make a deal that’s great” for “America, but also good for Russia.”By May, Russia’s General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate—the G.R.U.—“had exfiltrated large volumes of data from the DNC,” according to the U.S. intelligence community’s unclassified report on Russian meddling. In June, the Russian government adopted “a clear preference” for Trump, according to the report. “Beginning in June, Putin’s public comments about the U.S. presidential race avoided directly praising President-elect Trump, probably because Kremlin officials thought that any praise from Putin personally would backfire in the United States. Nonetheless, Putin publicly indicated a preference for President-elect Trump’s stated policy to work with Russia, and pro-Kremlin figures spoke highly about what they saw as his Russia-friendly positions on Syria and Ukraine.”
That same month, Russian associates of the Trump family reached out to offer the Trump campaign some direct assistance. On June 3rd, Rob Goldstone, a British music publicist and former tabloid journalist, e-mailed Donald Trump, Jr., offering “some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father,” and noted that the offer was “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” A meeting was set for June 9th, and Trump’s oldest child forwarded the full e-mail exchange to Kushner and Paul Manafort, who at the time was the campaign chairman. The subject line was “Russia - Clinton - private and confidential.”
Yesterday, Kushner insisted, “I did not read or recall this e-mail exchange before it was shown to me by my lawyers.” Whether or not that’s true, he attended the meeting. According to Kushner’s account of the meeting, it was uneventful. He got there late, some Russians he never heard of were discussing adoption policy, and he quickly messaged his assistant to call him so he had an excuse to bail. Longtime intelligence officials have a more jaundiced view. Michael Hayden, the former head of the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency, told me that he was convinced the meeting was a classic “soft approach” by Russian intelligence. He cited a recent Washington Post article, by Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, that argued that the meeting “is in line with what intelligence analysts would expect an overture in a Russian influence operation to look like,” and that it may have been the “green light Russia was looking for to launch a more aggressive phase of intervention in the U.S. election.”
Hayden told me, “My god, this is just such traditional tradecraft.” He said that he has talked to people in the intelligence community about Mowatt-Larssen’s theory and that “every case officer I’ve pushed on this” agreed with it. “This is how they do it.”
Hayden explained that the Russians would have learned several things from the approach. “Would they take the meeting?” he said. “So, then you get the willingness. No. 2, would they report the meeting?” Hayden suggested that Russian intelligence was sophisticated enough to know whether the Trump campaign reported the meeting to the F.B.I., which it didn’t. So, while Kushner claimed that the meeting was irrelevant, from a Russian intelligence perspective it would have been seen as a clear signal. “At the end, they have established that these guys are willing,” Hayden said, pausing. “How do I put this? They did not reject a relationship.”
The intelligence community’s report makes a similar point, noting, “Russian influence campaigns are multifaceted and designed to be deniable because they use a mix of agents of influence, cutouts, front organizations, and false-flag operations.”
On July 22, 2016, WikiLeaks published its first batch of e-mails stolen from the D.N.C., and revelations contained in the e-mails became a favorite topic for the Trump campaign throughout the summer and fall. On October 4th, after a lengthy internal debate, the Obama Administration finally went public with its accusations about Russia’s meddling. “The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations,” a joint statement by the Department of Homeland Security and the director of National Intelligence that was posted at 3:30 p.m. said. One hour later, Podesta’s e-mails were released by WikiLeaks. (It was an eventful day: in between, at about 4 p.m., the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape was also released.)
The Trump campaign was more interested in the release from WikiLeaks than the release from the intelligence community. “This just came out—WikiLeaks!” Trump exclaimed at a rally on October 10, 2016, in Pennsylvania, promoting the latest disclosures. “I love WikiLeaks!” Trump, according to one count, mentioned the group or the leaked e-mails a hundred and sixty-four times in the last thirty days of the campaign.
Eric Swalwell, a Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told me that one of the key questions that congressional investigators have for Kushner is why he ignored the intelligence community’s warnings about Russia. “Once it became public that they were interfering in our election, which was in June, why did you continue to have contacts with them?” Swalwell, whose committee interviewed Kushner on Tuesday morning, said. “They don’t discuss at all, like, ‘Hey, Russia is interfering in our election. Should we talk to them about that?’ ”
In fact, Kushner never raised Russia’s meddling during his two post-election meetings with Russians, according to his own accounts. Kislyak contacted Kushner on November 16th, and they met on December 1st. Once again, the Russians seemed to have a level of access to the Trump campaign that other countries, including Western allies, could only dream of. In his testimony, Kushner confirmed that at this meeting, which took place in Trump Tower, he and Kislyak and Michael Flynn, the incoming national-security adviser, who also attended, discussed using communications equipment at the Russian Embassy. Kushner said the purpose was to relay information from Russian generals about Syria.
There was no skepticism about Russia or its actions in recent years from Kushner. But Kislyak was representing a leader who, as John Brennan, the former C.I.A. director, recently noted, “assaulted one of the foundational pillars of our democracy, our electoral system, that invaded Ukraine, annexed Crimea, that has suppressed and repressed political opponents in Russia and has caused the deaths of many of them.”
The Kushner-Kislyak relationship continued. On December 13th, at Kislyak’s urging, Kushner met with Sergey Gorkov, a Russian banker who is close to Putin. Again, what jumps out from Kushner’s account of the meeting is the easy access that the Russians had—“I agreed to meet Mr. Gorkov because the Ambassador has been so insistent,” and “said he had a direct relationship with” Putin, Kushner noted—and the obvious attempts to soften up Trump’s closest aides and family members. Gorkov, whose bank, Vnesheconombank, was affected by the Obama Administration’s sanctions against Russia, brought Kushner a piece of art and a bag of dirt from Nvgorod, Belarus, where Kushner’s grandparents are from. Kushner insists that there were no real policies discussed at the meeting, which he said lasted less than a half hour.
As with his accounts of all the other interactions with Russians, Kushner claims he was simply a naïve staffer exchanging benign pleasantries. His professed innocence about the nature of these contacts may be the most troubling part of his testimony. The Russians were running a complex—and seemingly successful—campaign to gain access to Trump’s orbit, and the President-elect’s most trusted adviser claims he was clueless about what was actually going on. Kushner’s testimony does not reveal evidence of any crimes, but it does reveal a campaign and Presidential transition that were remarkably easy targets for Russian intelligence efforts.
“The Russians clearly thought they had reasons to believe this would be a friendly audience,” Hayden said. “If you’ve never seen a major-league curveball, you shouldn’t pretend you’re a major-leaguer.”Ryan Lizza, an on-air contributor for CNN, was The New Yorker’s Washington correspondent from 2007-2017.Read more »<div>=</div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/trumps-2016-america-first-energy-speech-was-edited-and-preapproved-by-saudi-arabia-and-uae/">https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/trumps-2016-america-first-energy-speech-was-edited-and-preapproved-by-saudi-arabia-and-uae/</a></div><div>
</div><div><div>no lnx</div><div>Trump’s 2016 ‘America First’ energy speech was edited and pre-approved by Saudi Arabia and UAE</div><div> President Donald Trump walks with Saudi Arabia’s Deputy Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, along the West Colonnade of the White House, Tuesday, March 14, 2017. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)]</div><div>
</div><div>Written by Mark Sumner / Daily Kos July 30, 2019</div><div>
</div><div>During the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump was set to do a speech on energy in which he was going to start pitching the phrase “America First,” but before he went onstage to talk about his plans for American energy production, one of Trump’s advisers ran the speech past officials from the United Arab Emirates. And then copies were sent to Saudi Arabia. So it was America first—so long as the UAE and Saudis are okay with that. When he finally got around to sharing the speech with Americans, some of the language in Trump’s “America First” speech actually came from the UAE.</div><div>
</div><div>According to ABC News, it was Trump adviser Thomas Barrack who arranged to give representatives from the UAE a preview of the speech two weeks before Trump delivered it. An associate of Barrack’s provided the speech to both Saudi and UAE representatives, still before Trump had delivered it to Americans. Finally, Barrack worked with Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort to insert revisions made by the UAE into the speech that Trump actually delivered. Manafort wrote back to Barrack confirming that the final version of the speech included the language requested by the UAE.</div><div> </div><div>Why is this coming to light now? Because investigators for the House Oversight Committee—the committee chaired by Rep. Elijah Cummings—have unearthed a trove of communications featuring Manafort, Barrack, and representatives from the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Though Trump’s attack on Rep. Cummings appears to have been tied to a Fox News hit piece, the idea of going after the Oversight Committee chair might very much have already been on Trump’s mind.</div><div>
</div><div>The recommended language from Barrack’s UAE contact at one point included suggesting that Trump directly mention Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, but that apparently didn’t mesh too well with the screw-the-world tone of the speech that included Trump’s declaration that he would withdraw from the Paris agreement. The final speech included a toned-down version of the text requested by the UAE that said that Trump wanted to “work with our Gulf allies to develop a positive energy relationship as part of our anti-terrorism strategy.”</div><div>
</div><div>Barrack seemed to realize that this communication between the Trump campaign and a foreign government over the future of U.S. energy policy was problematic at best. In an exchange with Manafort, he noted that the language he was proposing to add to the speech was “probably as close as I can get without crossing a lot of lines.” Whether he’s concerned about crossing U.S. law, or crossing Mohammed bin Salman, isn’t clear.</div><div>
</div><div>Investigators for the Oversight Committee have collected more than 60,000 documents showing “intermingling of private interests and public policy decisions” by Trump both before and after the election. Some of this information was released in a report on Monday, and follows similar information released by the House in February after whistleblowers discussed these connections between the Trump White House and foreign governments.</div><div>
</div><div>The request to mention Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, along with the crown prince of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, is of great interest. At the time of Trump’s speech, Mohammed bin Salman was not the crown prince. He wouldn’t assume that position until an internal “mini-coup” in 2017, immediately following Trump’s visit to Saudi Arabia. Since then, Jared Kushner has made multiple trips to visit him, delivering to him classified information to use against his enemies. Trump has issued two vetoes of bills designed to halt arms sales used in Mohammed bin Salman’s expansive war in Yemen.</div></div><div>
</div><div></div><div>AH AN 619</div><div>
</div><div><div class="header-list-style" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Cabin, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><h2 class="entry-title grid-title" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; font-size: 17px; font-family: " open="Open" sans="Sans" sans-serif="sans-serif" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" px="px"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/doj-money-laundering-probe-of-deutsche-bank-includes-kushner-transactions/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; color: rgb(49, 49, 49); transition: all 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer; font-size: 18px; letter-spacing: 0px;">DOJ money laundering probe of Deutsche Bank includes Kushner transactions</a></h2><div class="grid-post-box-meta" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 12px 0px 0px; padding: 0px; font-size: 12px;">by <a class="url fn n" href="https://www.alternet.org/author/alex-henderson/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; color: rgb(49, 49, 49); transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer; font-size: inherit;">Alex Henderson</a> June 20, 2019</div></div><div class="item-content entry-content" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 18px 0px 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Cabin, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is conducting a criminal investigation of possible money laundering violations by Deutsche Bank, and the New York Times is reporting that the probe will…</div></div><div></div>an 619Jared Kushner gave a disastrous interview to Axios’ Jonathan Swan as shown in the second season premiere of the outlet’s HBO series, which was released over the weekend. And the president’s son-in-law and top advisers is now getting appropriately raked over the coals.<div class="p1_6" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace tore into Kushner on Monday during a panel discussion on her show “Deadline: White House.” She zeroed in on Kushner and Ivanka as two of the major deleterious forces within the administration.She noted how Kushner “drove Rex Tillerson out of the administration. He repelled top-tier talent for the chief of staff job. It would seem to be that if there’s rot in this White House, the malignancy is Jared and Ivanka.”<div class="p3_6" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">She argued that their “profound ignorance and their profound hubris” are major hindrances for the administration — particularly as they push other people out of the way who, despite their countless flaws and moral failings, may have had some basic competencies in running a government.<div class="p4_6" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">“All of their enemies are now gone,” she said. “They had it out for John Kelly, they had it out for Don McGahn. So his incompetence and his hubris aside, for his audience of one, he is steamrolling everyone else. And he’s in charge of more and more and more.”<div class="p5_6" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Watch the clip below=met with jared K In white house after logs gone?uncle Bibi? Kushner INC bookTV=<a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/jared-kushner-ordered-smear-campaign-against-army-vet-who-refused-to-serve-in-trump-white-house-book/">https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/jared-kushner-ordered-smear-campaign-against-army-vet-who-refused-to-serve-in-trump-white-house-book/</a><div>=</div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/mysterious-qatar-linked-cash-infusion-that-bailed-out-jared-kushner-will-be-investigated-by-house-dems/">https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/mysterious-qatar-linked-cash-infusion-that-bailed-out-jared-kushner-will-be-investigated-by-house-dems/</a></div><div>
</div><div>=</div>cohen outed security clearence=<div>=</div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/here-are-5-of-the-craziest-revelations-from-the-new-yorkers-expose-of-fox-news-influence-on-trump/">https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/here-are-5-of-the-craziest-revelations-from-the-new-yorkers-expose-of-fox-news-influence-on-trump/</a></div><div>
</div><div>Monday, The New Yorker published Jane Mayer’s <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/03/11/the-making-of-the-fox-news-white-house/amp?twitter_impression=true" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">stunning exposé</a> into how Fox News, always a right-wing network, has morphed into an overt propaganda instrument of President Donald Trump’s White House, and how the symbiotic relationship between the president and Fox’s billionaire international news mogul owner Rupert Murdoch has effectively created something that has never before existed in American politics.<div class="p1_20" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">To some degree, the article covers ground that has long been known or suspected — the way that Trump’s policy decisions on everything from the <a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/why-fox-news-made-trump-shut-down-the-government.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">federal government shutdown</a> to the <a href="https://www.salon.com/2017/07/26/is-trumps-transgender-ban-linked-to-tucker-carlsons-spurious-claims-on-child-abuse/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">transgender military ban</a> are informed by his daily binge-watching of Fox talk shows; how former Fox executive Bill Shine has <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/12/07/foxification-trump-white-house-visualized/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">blurred the Fox and White House payrolls</a> since being hired as Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff; and how Fox itself has discarded the few journalistic guardrails it had during President Barack Obama’s years, with hosts like Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs now free to openly join political rallies and offer advice to the president.<div class="p2_20" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="teadsNative" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">But there are some new, mind-blowing revelations in Mayer’s article. Here are five of the most significant:<div class="p3_20" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><ol style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 50px; list-style: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><li style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 2px; padding: 0px; list-style: decimal;">Trump ranks reporters on a scale of 1 to 10 for their “loyalty” to him — and Steve Doocy is a 12.</li></ol>Trump is well known for <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/news/reliable-source/wp/2017/09/25/from-angelina-jolie-to-kim-k-how-donald-trump-rates-women-in-new-howard-stern-tapes/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">assigning numbers to women</a> based on how attractive he thinks they are. But according to Mayer’s reporting, he does the same thing for reporters based on how loyal he thinks they are to him. “Bret Baier, Fox News’ chief political anchor, is a 6; Hannity a solid 10. Steve Doocy, the co-host of ‘Fox & Friends,’ is so adoring that Trump gives him a 12.”<div class="p4_20" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Needless to say, this is a dangerous development. Trump has a track record of rewarding and punishing reporters based on his whims. During the presidential transition, he <a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/313898-ap-breitbart-had-front-row-seat-at-trump-presser" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">reserved a seat at a press conference</a> for a Breitbart reporter. And last year, Trump <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/07/media/trump-cnn-press-conference/index.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">suspended</a> the press pass of CNN’s Jim Acosta after he challenged the president’s claims on special counsel Robert Mueller and the Honduran migrant caravan. He later relented after one of his own judicial appointees <a href="https://www.alternet.org/2018/11/judge-rules-white-house-must-reinstate-jim-acostas-press-pass-now/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">ordered</a> him to restore Acosta’s credentials.<div class="p5_20" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><ol start="2" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 50px; list-style: none;"><li style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 2px; padding: 0px; list-style: decimal;">Jared Kushner is effectively Rupert Murdoch’s direct pipeline to the White House.</li></ol>Despite having <a href="https://www.cheatsheet.com/money-career/how-these-seemingly-unqualified-people-scored-powerful-jobs.html/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">essentially no qualifications</a> for any of it, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner has worn numerous hats in the administration, from <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/07/world/americas/kushner-mexico-president-diplomacy.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">meeting with foreign heads of state</a> to <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-kushner-tries-to-win-support-for-peace-plan-in-arab-world-inflames-israeli-right-1.6980369" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">working on the Middle East peace plan</a> to <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/3/28/15075416/kushner-solve-opioid-crisis" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">fixing the opioid epidemic</a> — and Trump trusts him enough to have <a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/trump-reportedly-overruled-white-house-officials-to-grant-his-son-in-law-a-top-secret-clearance-and-tried-to-cover-it-up/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">overridden intelligence officials</a> to give him a top-secret security clearance.<div class="p6_20" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">One other person who trusts him, according to Mayer’s article, is Murdoch. In fact, Kushner may be Murdoch’s most direct liaison with the Trump administration.<div class="p7_20" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Sources told The New Yorker that Kushner routinely asks Murdoch for advice, has “assured Murdoch that the White House is a smooth-running operation, despite many reports suggesting that it is chaotic,” and that the two of them communicate “Like, every day.” Given that the White House has given Kushner such a massive portfolio of responsibility and trust, Murdoch’s relationship with Kushner is likely one of the biggest influences he has on the executive branch.<div class="p8_20" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><ol start="3" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 50px; list-style: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><li style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 2px; padding: 0px; list-style: decimal;">Roger Ailes allegedly fed Trump questions before the GOP debates.</li></ol>During the presidential election, it was reported that former Fox News host Megyn Kelly — who famously tried to question Trump on his treatment of women at the GOP debates only to have Trump <a href="https://nypost.com/2015/08/08/trump-megyn-kelly-had-blood-coming-out-of-her-wherever/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">dismiss her as on her period</a> — <a href="https://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/305534-megyn-kelly-trump-got-debate-question-in-advance" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">asserted</a> that Trump had help with the debate questions ahead of time. She later denied saying or believing this — but Mayer’s reporting now backs up this idea:<div class="p9_20" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><blockquote style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 10px 20px 10px 24px; position: relative; line-height: 1.7; overflow: hidden; background: rgb(245, 245, 245); border: none !important;">A pair of Fox insiders and a source close to Trump believe that Ailes informed the Trump campaign about Kelly’s question. Two of those sources say that they know of the tipoff from a purported eyewitness. In addition, a former Trump campaign aide says that a Fox contact gave him advance notice of a different debate question, which asked the candidates whether they would support the Republican nominee, regardless of who won.<div class="p10_20" style="font-style: italic; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" /></blockquote>It is hard to know whether this claim is accurate, as Ailes is deceased and contemporary reporting suggested that Fox was not yet in Trump’s orbit at that point of the Republican cycle. But if true, this would be highly damning — especially considering Trump asserted that the <a href="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/donna-brazile-finally-admits-she-shared-debate-questions-with-clinton-campaign" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">incident</a> where former Democratic National Committee Chief Donna Brazile gave Hillary Clinton CNN questions ahead of time proved the network was “a total fake.”<div class="p11_20" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><ol start="4" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 50px; list-style: none;"><li style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 2px; padding: 0px; list-style: decimal;">Fox News uncovered the Stormy Daniels scandal during the election — but buried the story and retaliated against the reporter who found it.</li></ol>The revelation that Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen made an illegal hush payment to silence an affair between Trump and porn star Stormy Daniels, first reported in January 2018 by the Wall Street Journal, was a huge story that led to a massive federal investigation, jail time, and congressional investigations.<div class="p12_20" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">But all of it could have come out much sooner — because as Mayer reports, Fox News had the story during the 2016 presidential election, killed it, and may have retaliated against Diana Falzone, the reporter who uncovered it:<div class="p13_20" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><blockquote style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 10px 20px 10px 24px; position: relative; line-height: 1.7; overflow: hidden; background: rgb(245, 245, 245); border: none !important;">Falzone had worked on the story since March, and by October she had confirmed it with Daniels through her manager at the time, Gina Rodriguez, and with Daniels’s former husband, Mike Moz, who described multiple calls from Trump. Falzone had also amassed e-mails between Daniels’s attorney and Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen, detailing a proposed cash settlement, accompanied by a nondisclosure agreement. Falzone had even seen the contract.<div class="p14_20" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" /></blockquote><blockquote style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 10px 20px 10px 24px; position: relative; line-height: 1.7; overflow: hidden; background: rgb(245, 245, 245); border: none !important;">But Falzone’s story didn’t run—it kept being passed off from one editor to the next. After getting one noncommittal answer after another from her editors, Falzone at last heard from LaCorte, who was then the head of FoxNews.com. Falzone told colleagues that LaCorte said to her, “Good reporting, kiddo. But Rupert wants Donald Trump to win. So just let it go.” LaCorte denies telling Falzone this, but one of Falzone’s colleagues confirms having heard her account at the time.<div class="p15_20" style="font-style: italic; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" /></blockquote>According to The New Yorker, Fox then proceeded to demote Falzone, without explaining why. She later sued Fox, which settled the case and made her sign a nondisclosure agreement that prohibits her from discussing the details of her employment.<div class="p16_20" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><ol start="5" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 50px; list-style: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><li style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 2px; padding: 0px; list-style: decimal;">Trump personally ordered an economic adviser to use antitrust lawsuits to attack Fox News’ competitors.</li></ol>The Justice Department’s opposition to the AT&T-Time Warner merger, which is cleared to go through after federal courts <a href="https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/u-s-appeals-court-rejects-justice-department-antitrust-challenge-to-at-t-time-warner-deal-11551194524" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">demolished</a> the antitrust lawsuit, has always seemed legally suspicious — indeed, one of the reasons judges rejected it is that AT&T put forward <a href="https://twitter.com/hadas_gold/status/1102547204991057920?s=21" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">compelling evidence</a> that Trump personally wanted to kill the deal to harm CNN.<div class="p17_20" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">According to Mayer’s reporting, that’s exactly what was going on. Trump ordered his then-economic adviser Gary Cohn to pressure the Justice Department to block the merger — something Cohn refused to do, but which the department eventually followed through with. Trump showed <a href="https://twitter.com/hadas_gold/status/1102525899407347713?s=21" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">no such anti-corporate sentiment</a> with Disney’s acquisition of 21st Century Fox, a deal of similar scope but which would benefit Murdoch financially.<div class="p18_20" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">This development also puts the Federal Communications Commission’s unexpected decision last year to kill the Sinclair Broadcast Group’s merger with Tribune Media, which was arguably <a href="https://www.alternet.org/sinclair-broadcast-group-tribune-merger-officially-dead" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">good for the local news market</a>, in a more sinister light: that merger could have strengthened Fox’s biggest competitor in conservative television broadcasting.<div class="p19_20" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Antitrust law is a powerful pro-consumer tool when applied fairly and equitably, but in the hands of someone like Trump, it can also be used to chill freedom of the press by rewarding and punishing news organizations.
</div><div>
</div><div>=</div>=<div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">A hospital-board election in central California wasn’t exactly what Burstien had in mind when he set out to establish Psy-Group in the U.S. election market. In early 2016, as the Presidential race was heating up, he and Zamel both tried to pitch much bigger players. Being hired by one of the main campaigns initially seemed like a long shot for an obscure new company whose services sounded risky, if not illegal. Lawyers at firms in New York and Washington expressed curiosity about Psy-Group, but most were too cautious to sign contracts with the company.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The Trump campaign, however, presented an opportunity. Early in 2016, a Republican consultant with ties to the Israeli government put Psy-Group in touch with Rick Gates, a senior Trump campaign official. Eager to secure a potentially lucrative project, Burstien drew up plans for an intelligence and influence campaign to promote Trump and undermine his rivals, first in the Republican primary and then in the general election. In the proposal, dubbed Project Rome, which was first reported on by the Times, last October, Psy-Group used code names for the candidates: Trump was Lion, and Hillary Clinton was Forest. Psy-Group also hired the Washington law firm Covington & Burling to conduct a legal review of its work. Former Psy-Group officials said that the resulting memo gave a green light to begin offering the company’s services in the U.S. (A spokesperson for Covington & Burling said that the firm could not discuss its advice to clients.)</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="">Zamel often operated independently of Burstien, and it’s unclear how closely the two coördinated, but both saw the Trump campaign as a potential client. Trump’s vocal support for Israel and his hard-line views on Iran appealed to Zamel, and he reached out to Trump’s inner circle. In early May, 2016, Zamel sent an e-mail to Gingrich, saying that he could provide the Trump campaign with powerful tools that would use social media to advance Trump’s chances. Zamel suggested a meeting in Washington to discuss the matter further. Gingrich forwarded the e-mail to Jared Kushner and asked if the campaign would be interested. Kushner checked with others on the campaign, including Brad Parscale, who ran Web operations. According to a person familiar with the exchange, Parscale told Kushner that they didn’t need Zamel’s help. (A 2016 campaign official said, “We didn’t use their services.”)</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Also that spring, Zamel was introduced to George Nader, a Lebanese-American with ties to the Emirati leader Mohammed bin Zayed and other powerful figures in the Gulf. Born in 1959, Nader was almost twice Zamel’s age. Both men preferred to operate behind the scenes, but were consummate networkers who touted their connections to high-level political figures. Some viewed Nader as an influence peddler; others said that he had been intimately involved in high-stakes negotiations in the Middle East for decades. Martin Indyk, an adviser to Presidents Clinton and Obama on Middle Eastern affairs and now a distinguished fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said, “We used to joke that George was in the pay of at least three intelligence services—the Syrian, the Israeli, and the Iranian.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In June, 2016, Nader was attending an international economic forum in St. Petersburg, Russia, when Zamel approached him and requested a meeting. According to a representative for Nader, Zamel told Nader that he was trying to raise money for a social-media campaign in support of Trump; he thought that Nader’s Gulf contacts might be interested in contributing financially. Nader listened to Zamel’s pitch but didn’t make any commitments, according to the Nader representative. (Zamel’s representatives denied that he spoke to Nader in St. Petersburg about trying to help Trump.)</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Zamel had another opportunity to pitch his services in early August, 2016, when Erik Prince, the founder of the Blackwater security firm, helped arrange a meeting at Trump Tower among Zamel, Nader, and Donald Trump, Jr. (Prince, whose sister Betsy DeVos became Trump’s Education Secretary, was a major Trump donor and had access to members of his team.) In the meeting, Zamel told Trump, Jr., that he supported his father’s campaign, and talked about Psy-Group’s influence operations. (Zamel’s lawyer, Marc Mukasey, played down the encounter, insisting that Zamel made no formal proposals during the meeting.)</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Burstien said that his talks with the Trump campaign went nowhere; a representative for Zamel denied that his client engaged in any activity having to do with the election. But, according to the Nader representative, shortly after the election Zamel bragged to Nader that he had conducted a secret campaign that had been influential in Trump’s victory. Zamel agreed to brief Nader on how the operation had worked. During that conversation, Zamel showed Nader several analytical reports, including one that described the role of avatars, bots, fake news, and unattributed Web sites in assisting Trump. Zamel told Nader, “Here’s the work that we did to help get Trump elected,” according to the Nader representative. Nader paid Zamel more than two million dollars, but never received copies of the reports, that person said.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">A representative for Zamel denied that he told Nader that he or any of his operatives had intervened to help Trump during the 2016 election. If Nader came away with that impression, the representative said, he was mistaken. “Nader may have paid Zamel not knowing when, how, or why the report was created, but he wanted to use it to gain access and new business,” the representative said. “In fact, it used publicly available material to show how social media—in general—was used in connection with the campaign.”...nyer</div>see tom barrack, mbs etc also packer nat'l enq?! =yikes<a href="https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/jared-kushner-thinks-he-has-deal-century-middle-east-peace-it-would-have" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/jared-kushner-thinks-he-has-deal-century-middle-east-peace-it-would-have</a>
<a href="https://www.newsweek.com/jared-kushner-tried-strip-palestinians-refugee-status-1058860" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">Leaked emails</a> from Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law and appointed steward of the Israel-Palestine conflict, are shedding light on his planned “deal of the century” for peace in the Middle East. In extracts published by <a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/08/03/trump-palestinians-israel-refugees-unrwaand-allies-seek-end-to-refugee-status-for-millions-of-palestinians-united-nations-relief-and-works-agency-unrwa-israel-palestine-peace-plan-jared-kushner-greenb/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">Foreign Policy magazine</a>, Kushner proposes “disrupting” the work of the UN Relief and Works Agency (<a href="https://www.unrwa.org/" style="text-decoration-line: none; outline: none;">UNRWA</a>) and ending the refugee status of 5m Palestinians across the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.dmn no lnx chartGOP campaigns took $7.35 million from oligarch linked to RussiaFILED UNDERCOMMENTARY  AT AUG 2017 SHARE
Profile image for Ruth MayRuth May, ContributorConnect with Ruth May EmailEditor's note: Ruth May wrote this column in August 2017. Click here for an extensive update. 
Party loyalty is often cited as the reason that GOP leaders have not been more outspoken in their criticism of President Donald Trump and his refusal to condemn Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential election. Yet there may be another reason that top Republicans have not been more vocal in their condemnation. Perhaps it's because they have their own links to the Russian oligarchy that they would prefer go unnoticed.
Donald Trump and the political action committees for Mitch McConnell, Marco Rubio, Scott Walker, Lindsey Graham, John Kasich and John McCain accepted $7.35 million in contributions from a Ukrainian-born oligarch who is the business partner of two of Russian president Vladimir Putin's favorite oligarchs and a Russian government bank.
During the 2015-2016 election season, Ukrainian-born billionaire Leonard "Len" Blavatnik contributed $6.35 million to leading Republican candidates and incumbent senators. Mitch McConnell was the top recipient of Blavatnik's donations, collecting $2.5 million for his GOP Senate Leadership Fund under the names of two of Blavatnik's holding companies, Access Industries and AI Altep Holdings, according to Federal Election Commission documents and OpenSecrets.org.
How Putin's proxies helped funnel millions into GOP campaignsMarco Rubio's Conservative Solutions PAC and his Florida First Project received $1.5 million through Blavatnik's two holding companies. Other high dollar recipients of funding from Blavatnik were PACS representing Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker at $1.1 million, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham at $800,000, Ohio Governor John Kasich at $250,000 and Arizona Senator John McCain at $200,000.
In January, Quartz reported that Blavatnik donated another $1 million to Trump's Inaugural Committee. Ironically, the shared address of Blavatnik's companies is directly across the street from Trump Tower on 5th Avenue in New York.
Len Blavatnik, considered to be one of the richest men in Great Britain, holds dual citizenship in the U.S. and the U.K. He is known for his business savvy and generous philanthropy, but not without controversy.
In 2010, Oxford University drew intense criticism for accepting a donation of 75 million pounds from Blavatnik for a new school of government bearing his name. Faculty, alumni and international human rights activists claimed the university was selling its reputation and prestige to Putin's associates.
Blavatnik's relationships with Russian oligarchs close to Putin, particularly Oleg Deripaska, should be worrisome for Trump and the six GOP leaders who took Blavatnik's money during the 2016 presidential campaign. Lucky for them no one has noticed. Yet.
How some evangelical Christians are complicit in the cruelty of politicsOleg Deripaska is the founder and majority owner of RUSAL, the world's second largest aluminum company, based in Russia. Len Blavatnik owns a significant stake in RUSAL and served on its Board until November 10, 2016, two days after Donald Trump was elected. 
Deripaska controls RUSAL with a 48 percent majority stake through his holding company, EN+ Group, and the Russian government owns 4.35 percent stake of EN+ Group through its second-largest state owned bank, VTB. VTB was exposed in the Panama papers in 2016for facilitating the flow of billions of dollars to offshore companies linked to Vladimir Putin and is under sanctions by the U.S. government.
Cyprus is at the center of a circle of corruption surrounding TrumpDeripaska has been closely connected to the Kremlin since he married into Boris Yeltsin's family in 2001, which literally includes him in the Russian clan known as "The Family."According to the Associated Press, starting in 2006, Deripaska made annual payments of $10 million to Paul Manafort through the Bank of Cyprus to advance Putin's global agenda.
Len Blavatnik's co-owner in RUSAL is his long-time business partner, Viktor Vekselberg, another Russian oligarch with close ties to  Putin. Blavatnik and Vekselberg hold their 15.8 percent joint stake in RUSAL in the name of Sual Partners, their offshore company in the Bahamas. Vekselberg also happens to be the largest shareholder in the Bank of Cyprus.
Another oligarch with close ties to Putin, Dmitry Rybolovlev, owns a 3.3 percent stake in the Bank of Cyprus. Rybolovlev is known as "Russia's Fertilizer King" and has been in the spotlight for several months as the purchaser of Trump's 60,000 square-foot mansion in Palm Beach. Rybolovlev bought the estate for $54 million more than Trump paid for the property at the bottom of the crash in the U.S. real estate market.
The convoluted web that links Putin's oligarchs to Trump's political associates and top Republicans is difficult to take in.
Trump and Putin have a common approach to governance. They rely heavily on long-term relationships and family ties. While there have been tensions between Putin and Deripaska over the years, the Kremlin came to Deripaska's rescue in 2009 when he was on the verge of bankruptcy by providing a $4.5 billion emergency loan through state-owned Vnesheconombank (VEB), where Putin is chair of the advisory board.
VEB, known as President Putin's "pet bank," is now in crisis after sanctions applied by Europe and U.S. in 2014 have isolated it from the international banks that were the sources of its nearly $4 billion in hard currency loans that, according to Bloomberg, mature this year and in 2018.
Russia's international currency reserves are near a 10-year low, which has put further pressure on the president of VEB, Sergey Gorkov, to find sources of international rescue capital. Notably, it was Gorkov who met secretly with Jared Kushner in December at Trump Tower. Kushner's failure to report the meeting with Gorkov has drawn the attention of the Senate intelligence committee that now wants to question Kushner about the meeting.
Ruth May is a business professor at the University of Dallas and an expert on the economies of Russia and Ukraine. She wrote this column for The Dallas Morning News. Twitter: @ruthcmay
CORRECTION, 12:11 p.m., August 7: The headline on an earlier version of this column incorrectly said Blavatnik is Russian. He was born in Urkraine during the Soviet era.
An earlier version of this column used the name Leonid "Len" Blavatnik. He changed his first name to Leonard. 
The column has also been updated to remove language describing the online presentation of a press release about Blavatnik resigning from the RUSAL board because it lacked context. =hope. van j spks well of jard k<h4 class="title" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-weight="font-weight" line-height="line-height" color="color" rgb="rgb" margin-top="margin-top" px="px" margin-bottom="margin-bottom" font-size="font-size" background-color="background-color"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/drugs/rare-moment-bipartisanship-senate-passes-major-sentencing-reform-bill" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration-line: none; line-height: 1;">In a Rare Moment of Bipartisanship, the Senate Passes a Major Sentencing Reform Bill</a></h4><div class="article-meta" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; right: 0px;" open="Open" sans="Sans" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Phillip Smith - December 20, 2018 - Drug Reporter</div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/jared-kushner-was-key-player-trumps-national-enquirer-blackmail-scheme-against-msnbcs-scarborough">https://www.alternet.org/jared-kushner-was-key-player-trumps-national-enquirer-blackmail-scheme-against-msnbcs-scarborough</a> Kushner reportedly took part in an attempted blackmail scheme against his former friends Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski.President Donald Trump's son-in-law, who also serves as a senior White House adviser, took over for former Trump Organization attorney Michael Cohen as the main conduit between the president and National Enquirer publisher David Pecker, <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-jared-kushner-replaced-michael-cohen-as-trumps-national-enquirer-connection?ref=home" rel="noopener" target="blank" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration-line: none;">reported The Daily Beast</a>.Both Cohen, who has pleaded guilty to charges filed by the special counsel and federal prosecutors, and Pecker have agreed to cooperate with investigators regarding potential wrongdoing by the president and his associates.Pecker had hoped Cohen would continue serving Trump in the White House, but when he was left behind the American Media Inc. publisher settled on Kushner as his point person for business dealings with the president after the inauguration.He and Kushner discussed everything from international relations to media gossip, according to four sources, and Pecker boasted to associates that he had regular contact with the senior White House adviser.Both Pecker and Kushner forged close relationships with the Saudi royal family, and they also discussed possible dirt the Enquirer had dug up on the "Morning Joe" co-hosts.Scarborough and Brzezinski <a href="https://www.rawstory.com/2017/06/morning-joe-white-house-official-begged-me-to-grovel-before-trump-in-national-enquirer-blackmail-scheme/" rel="noopener" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">revealed</a> in late June 2017 that three senior Trump aides had urged them to "grovel" before the president or the tabloid would publish negative stories about them.Brzezinski said the tabloid sent reporters to harass her family and friends as White House officials begged them to call the president to apologize.The White House denied the MSNBC broadcasters' claims, but Trump <a href="https://www.rawstory.com/2017/06/trump-accidentally-confesses-to-blackmail-scheme-against-morning-joe-hosts/" rel="noopener" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">essentially confirmed</a> he had the ability to stop the Enquirer from publishing stories.<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Watched low rated <a href="https://twitter.com/Morning_Joe?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" style="text-decoration-line: none;">@Morning_Joe</a> for first time in long time. FAKE NEWS. He called me to stop a National Enquirer article. I said no! Bad show— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/880771685460344832?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" style="text-decoration-line: none;">June 30, 2017</a></blockquote>The Daily Beast <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/jared-kushner-told-joe-scarborough-talk-to-president-trump-about-enquirer-dirt" rel="noopener" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">later reported</a> that Kushner was involved in that matter, but Scarborough did not know that his friend had been in regular contact with the Enquirer's publisher.Trump was <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5235383/Jared-Kushner-asked-marry-Mika-Joe-angering-Trump.html" rel="noopener" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">reportedly angry</a> that Kushner had offered in January 2017 to officiate a wedding between Scarborough and Brzezinski, who had been friends with the president but later became outspoken critics.Shortly after the Scarborough-Brzezinski drama, Pecker visited Trump and Kushner at the White House, and Kacy Grine, a French businessman with ties to the Saudi business elite and royal family.Scarborough said the president called him during the campaign and boasted that he was friends with Pecker, and suggested the tabloid was planting stories to attack his political enemies.“He’d say, ‘Have you seen the Ben Carson story? Have you seen the Ben Carson story? Have you seen the story in the Enquirer,’ and then he’d talk about it,” Scarborough said.<interaction data-token="5b96855f8198b4e625350260" data-context="true" data-tags="" data-fallback="true" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" />Federal investigators are now questioning Pecker about those articles, which include payments to Trump's alleged mistresses and a story implicating Sen. Ted Cruz’s father in the Kennedy assassination, as possible campaign finance violations.
<h2 class="node-title" style="font-weight: normal; margin: 0px; width: 164px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/kushner-real-estate-magnates-made-life-unbearable-rent-controlled-tenants-drive-them-out-lawsuit" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: 700;">Kushner Real Estate Magnates Made Life 'Unbearable' for Rent-Controlled Tenants to Drive Them Out: Lawsuit</a></h2> yikes<a href="https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/jared-kushner-thinks-he-has-deal-century-middle-east-peace-it-would-have">https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/jared-kushner-thinks-he-has-deal-century-middle-east-peace-it-would-have</a>
<a href="https://www.newsweek.com/jared-kushner-tried-strip-palestinians-refugee-status-1058860" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Leaked emails</a> from Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law and appointed steward of the Israel-Palestine conflict, are shedding light on his planned “deal of the century” for peace in the Middle East. In extracts published by <a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/08/03/trump-palestinians-israel-refugees-unrwaand-allies-seek-end-to-refugee-status-for-millions-of-palestinians-united-nations-relief-and-works-agency-unrwa-israel-palestine-peace-plan-jared-kushner-greenb/" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Foreign Policy magazine</a>, Kushner proposes “disrupting” the work of the UN Relief and Works Agency (<a href="https://www.unrwa.org/" style="text-decoration-line: none;">UNRWA</a>) and ending the refugee status of 5m Palestinians across the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.Although the emails have not been published in full, these snippets are highly revealing. Kushner’s move against UNRWA marks the next stage in the Trump administration’s plan. In January 2018 – the same month that Kushner sent these emails – Trump announced <a href="https://theconversation.com/trump-cuts-aid-to-palestinian-refugees-and-throws-their-future-into-doubt-90282" style="text-decoration-line: none;">drastic cuts</a> in <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/948322497602220032?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E948322497602220032&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2018%2F01%2F03%2Fus%2Fpolitics%2Ftrump-tweets-nuclear-button.html" style="text-decoration-line: none;">US aid to UNRWA</a>.There are signs that defunding UNRWA is just the first stage of a much grander strategy; Kushner is also reportedly <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/palestinians/kushner-worked-to-strip-status-of-palestinian-refugees-1.6341143" style="text-decoration-line: none;">pressuring Jordan</a> to strip the 2m Palestinians living there of their refugee status. But even taken on its own, dissolving the agency would have catastrophic consequences.<div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin-bottom: 20px;">Out of the pictureUNRWA currently provides <a href="https://www.unrwa.org/what-we-do" style="text-decoration-line: none;">emergency aid, education and healthcare</a> to the Middle East’s millions of Palestinian refugees. Many live below the poverty line, and would have little or no support if UNRWA’s services were to end, with their host states lacking the necessary resources to step in.The impact would be political as well as humanitarian. The <a href="https://www.fmreview.org/palestine/rempel.html" style="text-decoration-line: none;">status of the refugees</a>, who lost their homes in the 1948 war, has long been one of the most contentious issues between Israel and the Palestinians. UNRWA’s work by definition implies <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/palestinians/.premium-with-anti-unrwa-campaign-trump-tries-to-destroy-a-palestinian-asset-1.6358965?utm_term=20180807-10%3A01&utm_campaign=Amira+Hass&utm_medium=email&writerAlerts=true&utm_source=smartfocus&utm_content=www.haaretz.com%2Fmiddle-east-news%2Fpalestinians%2F1.6358965" style="text-decoration-line: none;">international recognition</a> of the refugees’ situation and underlines their lawful <a href="https://ohrh.law.ox.ac.uk/palestinian-refugees-and-the-right-of-return-in-international-law/" style="text-decoration-line: none;">right of return</a>.If UNRWA were dissolved while the refugees remained stateless, <a href="https://mondoweiss.net/2018/02/funding-legacy-american/" style="text-decoration-line: none;">that would imply</a> that the contentious <a href="https://www.refworld.org/pdfid/543787384.pdf" style="text-decoration-line: none;">question</a> of their future and status had been resolved. On these grounds, the Palestinian Authority has <a href="https://www.palestinechronicle.com/reports-reveal-kushner-plan-to-dismantle-unrwa/" style="text-decoration-line: none;">condemned</a> the Kushner plan as an attempt to <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/palestinians/.premium-abbas-kushner-report-proves-u-s-wants-to-erase-palestinian-issue-1.6341547" style="text-decoration-line: none;">remove refugees from the equation</a> and erase their right of return, effectively denying them any chance of future citizenship in Israel-Palestine.On the other side, critics of UNRWA – including Israeli Prime Minister <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/06/11/israeli-pm-calls-un-dismantle-palestinian-aid-agency/?WT.mc_id=tmg_share_fb" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Benjamin Netanyahu</a> – contend that the agency <a href="https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/paradoxes-unrwa-palestine-refugees-israel-usa-trump-cuts-2" style="text-decoration-line: none;">perpetuates the Palestinian refugee crisis</a> by supporting the refugees in their current situation rather than helping pursue a political solution, and by <a href="https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/unrwa-an-obstacle-to-peace-humanitarian-goals-and-hate-free-education/" style="text-decoration-line: none;">promoting anti-Israeli feeling</a>. According to this view, the agency’s dissolution would improve prospects for peace.The reality suggests the opposite. UNRWA is <a href="https://mondoweiss.net/2018/07/perpetuate-conflict-perpetuates/" style="text-decoration-line: none;">a product rather than a cause</a> of the conflict, which will continue even if the agency is abolished. Stripping millions of people of basic welfare is more likely to heighten tensions than calm them. Israel would pay a price too; as an occupying power, it is legally obliged to safeguard the basic needs of the population living in areas it controls, but since UNRWA currently alleviates some of its obligations by providing essential services to 800,000 registered refugees in the <a href="https://www.unrwa.org/where-we-work/west-bank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">West Bank</a> and more than 1m in <a href="https://www.unrwa.org/where-we-work/gaza-strip" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Gaza</a>, the Israeli government is under far less pressure than it could be to take primary responsibility for their welfare.Kushner himself seems aware of the potential damage, writing in one email that the US should “risk breaking things” to get results. None of the leaked extracts includes any provision for minimising the fallout. But the US administration’s opposition to UNRWA isn’t just about the refugees it serves. This is part of a broader strategy to redraw the fundamental contours of the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process” as a whole.Dismantling OsloFor more than 20 years, this process has been operating on the framework laid out in the 1993 <a href="https://history.state.gov/milestones/1993-2000/oslo" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Oslo Accords</a>. <a href="https://www.acpr.org.il/publications/books/43-Zero-oslo-accord.pdf" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Oslo</a> established terms for a five-year interim period, to be followed by a full final peace agreement. It identified seven so-called <a href="https://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198298915.001.0001/acprof-9780198298915-chapter-14" style="text-decoration-line: none;">permanent status</a> issues – including that of the refugees – to be determined as part of this final agreement.While every previous US administration since 1993 has endorsed this framework, Trump has been steadily working to take each of the permanent status issues off the table.First, the administration recognised <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-trumps-recognition-of-jerusalem-as-the-capital-of-israel-means-for-the-middle-east-88722" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Jerusalem</a> – deemed the most important final status issue – as the unified capital of Israel. Appearing to acknowledge his strategy, Trump <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/948322497602220032" style="text-decoration-line: none;">explicitly described</a> the move as “taking Jerusalem off the table”. The recent opening of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/us-embassy-in-jerusalem-opens-amid-violence-4-essential-reads-96590" style="text-decoration-line: none;">new US embassy</a> in the city dashed Palestinian hopes that East Jerusalem would serve as the capital of their future state.According to the Oslo framework, the Palestinian refugees’ future is the second most important permanent status issue; by mooting the abolition of UNRWA, the Trump administration seems to be planning to take this one off the table too.The evidence suggests that the administration has similar plans for the third issue: Israeli settlements. In contrast to the Obama administration’s strong <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/choosing-not-to-veto-obama-lets-anti-settlement-resolution-pass-at-un-security-council/" style="text-decoration-line: none;">condemnation</a> of settlement activity in the West Bank, Trump has been mostly quiet on the issue. Kushner, along with ambassador David Friedman, <a href="https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/PLO-Secretary-General-Nation-State-Law-destroys-two-state-solution-563237" style="text-decoration-line: none;">supported</a> Israel’s recent <a href="https://www.vox.com/world/2018/7/31/17623978/israel-jewish-nation-state-law-bill-explained-apartheid-netanyahu-democracy" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Nation-State Law</a>, which promotes “Jewish settlement” as a national value.The four remaining permanent status issues are security arrangements, borders, international relations, and common interests such as allocation of water supplies. The Trump administration’s plans for each of these remains to be seen. Yet even if they are left on the table, the elimination of Jerusalem, the refugees and the settlements will leave the Palestinians – already the weaker party – exceptionally vulnerable. By gradually eliminating the permanent status issues, the Trump administration is working to severely restrict the scope of any final deal, with the aim of compelling the Palestinians to capitulate.<a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/anne-irfan-436682" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Anne Irfan</a>, Teaching Fellow in Middle Eastern History, <a href="https://theconversation.com/institutions/university-of-sussex-1218" style="text-decoration-line: none;">University of Sussex</a>This article was originally published on <a href="https://theconversation.com/" style="text-decoration-line: none;">The Conversation</a>=<a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/kushner-companies-loses-a-key-motion-in-class-action-filed-by-baltimore-tenants">https://www.propublica.org/article/kushner-companies-loses-a-key-motion-in-class-action-filed-by-baltimore-tenants</a>
just boast? newsweek<div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Johnnie Moore ?</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">@JohnnieM</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> Such an honor to pray within the Oval Office for @POTUS & @VP .</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">6:08 PM - Jul 11, 2017</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">7,630</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">8,879 people are talking about this</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Twitter Ads info and privacy</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Johnnie Moore, a Christian businessman and activist based in California, took the photo. Moore tells Newsweek that the occasion was an impromptu “time among friends” and that evangelicals feels like they can raise their concerns at the highest level in this administration—a contrast to the situation under former President Barack Obama.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
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</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“I couldn’t get the Obama administration to do anything. They denied a visa to an Iraqi nun that was petitioned to testify in front of our Congress, and I took it all up the chain to the State Department. It was a fight every step of the way and the White House was trying to block it and it was just crazy,” says Moore, a former senior vice president for communications at Liberty University, the largest evangelical Christian college in the U.S. and the venue for a commencement speech by President Trump in May.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">(The nun in question was Diana Momeka, whose visa to testify before a congressional hearing on the persecution of religious minorities by the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) was initially denied by the State Department in 2015, but was later granted.)</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">But things have changed under Trump, he says. “It’s a totally different time now. They’re not only on our speed dial, we’re on their speed dial. In my opinion, it’s good for America,” says Moore.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Trump at Liberty</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Then Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump delivers the convocation at the Vines Center on the campus of Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, on January 18, 2016.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Moore is a member of a board of evangelical advisers—in addition to Trump's board of Catholic advisers—first convened by Trump during the presidential campaign in June 2016. The evangelist says that members of the board are on first-name terms with many in Trump’s inner circle, including Jared Kushner, the president’s son in law.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“A number of us...communicate with Jared Kushner every other day, and, back during the campaign, he was our principal point of contact and in many ways still is,” says Moore.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">With Trump in the Oval Office, evangelicals have a direct line of communication to express concerns about policy, says Moore. “We have an open relationship with the White House, we can and do express those reservations,” he says. “There’s been specific instances when things have been changed. You win some, you lose some, but we’re part of a conversation.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Evangelical Protestants form the largest single religious demographic in the United States and, in the 2016 election, were the biggest backers of Trump among faith groups. Eighty-one percent of white evangelical (or born-again) Christians voted for Trump, according to a Pew Research Center poll released the day after the election. (The poll did not give a breakdown of evangelical votes by race, and 24 percent of U.S. evangelicals are non-white.)</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Liberty University prayers</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Thousands of students, supporters and invited guests sing songs of Christian praise before then Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump delivers the convocation in the Vines Center on the campus of Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia on January 18, 2016.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
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</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">This support has continued throughout Trump’s first six months in office, according to Paul Djupe, an associate professor at Denison University who specializes in religion and politics. Djupe says he has collected data in recent months that shows that aside from traditional hot-button issues for evangelicals like abortion and religious liberty, the community has backed Trump through the scandals his administration has weathered. For example, evangelicals mostly supported Trump’s decision to fire ex-FBI director James Comey and do not believe that the multiple investigations into alleged collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia will uncover any wrongdoing, says Djupe.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“Evangelicals, really, from the beginning of Trump’s campaign, have been working in symbiosis with the administration. They clearly have their own interests but they are all aboard the Trump train,” says Djupe.</div><div>=</div><div>bannon sez money laundering russian:</div><div>putin real estate<a href="https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/heres-why-trump-tries-so-hard-be-putins-good-side">https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/heres-why-trump-tries-so-hard-be-putins-good-side</a>Trump's <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/theres-no-stopping-him-trump-insists-on-a-russia-summit&source=gmail&ust=1531404720382000&usg=AFQjCNG6v_WR67s5POkP0vLmiRzWdUi72w" href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/theres-no-stopping-him-trump-insists-on-a-russia-summit" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">insistence</a> on a summit with Vladimir Putin, <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ahead-of-nato-and-putin-summits-trumps-unorthodox-diplomacy-rattles-allies/2018/07/06/16c7aa4e-7006-11e8-bd50-b80389a4e569_story.html?utm_term%3D.66cfc6a597d2&source=gmail&ust=1531404720382000&usg=AFQjCNHwlQmi2aLy_BoiZhwZTz7KTrrGuQ" href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ahead-of-nato-and-putin-summits-trumps-unorthodox-diplomacy-rattles-allies/2018/07/06/16c7aa4e-7006-11e8-bd50-b80389a4e569_story.html?utm_term=.66cfc6a597d2" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">disregarding</a> the advice of aides and worries of allies, is consistent with his obsession with the Russian leader. But it’s inconsistent with his pattern of choosing policies that resonate with his supporters -- there’s no indication that Trump's followers condone this bromance.So why does Trump pander to Putin? He <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/27/politics/donald-trump-vladimir-putin-stormy-daniels/index.html&source=gmail&ust=1531404720382000&usg=AFQjCNH-Ul1ZPcf47T-gOdkdd_AD5hVTQw" href="https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/27/politics/donald-trump-vladimir-putin-stormy-daniels/index.html" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">won’t criticize him</a> and incessantly <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=//www.cnn.com/interactive/2017/03/politics/trump-putin-russia-timeline/&source=gmail&ust=1531404720382000&usg=AFQjCNF9wm4Z_2WvHyUUch3FyOHTWPPYLw" href="https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2017/03/politics/trump-putin-russia-timeline/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">flatters</a> and <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://www.newsday.com/opinion/columnists/william-f-b-o-reilly/trump-russia-1.18135714&source=gmail&ust=1531404720382000&usg=AFQjCNGF8L5ui2Ag6VyPDM5r2E-6c1TRNQ" href="https://www.newsday.com/opinion/columnists/william-f-b-o-reilly/trump-russia-1.18135714" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">coddles</a> him. He has <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/annexing-crimea-was-egregious-why-does-trump-disagree/2018/07/08/5d749ebe-806b-11e8-b660-4d0f9f0351f1_story.html?utm_term%3D.2a2992387d41&source=gmail&ust=1531404720382000&usg=AFQjCNFfskJz3J4i4uvV-Mrk66iK6n0aSw" href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/annexing-crimea-was-egregious-why-does-trump-disagree/2018/07/08/5d749ebe-806b-11e8-b660-4d0f9f0351f1_story.html?utm_term=.2a2992387d41" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">winked at the annexation of Crimea</a>, <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/ahead-of-nato-summit-allies-wonder-will-nato-survive-trump/2018/07/08/3af62604-8134-11e8-b3b5-b61896f90919_story.html?utm_term%3D.bbf115df524c&source=gmail&ust=1531404720382000&usg=AFQjCNEG--cdiRTSHaPqo3KteAIcSQPlaw" href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/ahead-of-nato-summit-allies-wonder-will-nato-survive-trump/2018/07/08/3af62604-8134-11e8-b3b5-b61896f90919_story.html?utm_term=.bbf115df524c" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">threatened NATO</a>, suggested that <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/09/politics/trump-russia-g8-press-conference/index.html&source=gmail&ust=1531404720382000&usg=AFQjCNHMq7exulMJQOCA-XDPURlMnxF_KQ" href="https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/09/politics/trump-russia-g8-press-conference/index.html" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">the G7 should readmit Russia</a>, <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://www.vox.com/2018/3/1/17062036/trump-russia-midterm-election-2018&source=gmail&ust=1531404720382000&usg=AFQjCNGY-lWckgv7JbkgMZKN_utcH2-VQ" href="https://www.vox.com/2018/3/1/17062036/trump-russia-midterm-election-2018" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">and done nothing to prevent Russian meddling</a> in U.S. elections.Many fear Trump will hand Putin unwarranted concessions, like <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=//www.businessinsider.com/trump-putin-summit-nato-russia-sanctions-2018-6&source=gmail&ust=1531404720382000&usg=AFQjCNHAzdJ6Dn8A1wZjYbfYA5gdqjvlvQ" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-putin-summit-nato-russia-sanctions-2018-6" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">unraveling U.S. sanctions</a> against Russia. Trump was always soft on them anyway. After Russia <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=//observer.com/2018/03/kremlin-dissuaded-trump-appointing-mitt-romney-secretary-of-state/&source=gmail&ust=1531404720383000&usg=AFQjCNFsThJaJsJgQ3tSyk46RxT2zAgNtQ" href="https://observer.com/2018/03/kremlin-dissuaded-trump-appointing-mitt-romney-secretary-of-state/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">requested</a> a secretary of state who favored lifting them, Trump obliged, appointing Rex Tillerson instead of Mitt Romney. When Congress enacted sanctions on 15 Russian entities and individuals in 2017, Trump <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/03/trump-finally-imposes-russia-sanctions-that-congress-ordered-months-ago/&source=gmail&ust=1531404720383000&usg=AFQjCNHOoKDVeJxmH0YoG19DDgaO3V5y0Q" href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/03/trump-finally-imposes-russia-sanctions-that-congress-ordered-months-ago/" target="blank" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration-line: none;">delayed</a> implementing them for seven months and <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-puts-the-brake-on-new-russian-sanctions-reversing-haleys-announcement/2018/04/16/ac3ad4f8-417f-11e8-8569-26fda6b404c7_story.html?utm_term%3D.f2bed7f5ea4e&source=gmail&ust=1531404720383000&usg=AFQjCNGKw2dJiLbYo5BTUfpYofTQ61FKmw" href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-puts-the-brake-on-new-russian-sanctions-reversing-haleys-announcement/2018/04/16/ac3ad4f8-417f-11e8-8569-26fda6b404c7_story.html?utm_term=.f2bed7f5ea4e" target="blank" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration-line: none;">reversed</a> a decision to impose more.  What could be motivating Trump's largesse toward Russia? It's hard to argue that it's what’s best for America. A pattern of reported facts suggest it could be personal financial gain.Throughout the 2000s, Russians bought many apartments in Trump Tower and <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-trump-property/&source=gmail&ust=1531404720383000&usg=AFQjCNGxEhETG7ho1JeFvYkhYtgYltDSPg" href="https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-trump-property/" target="blank" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration-line: none;">$100 million worth</a> of Trump properties in Florida. But these sales <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/russia-paid-donald-trump-millions-of-dollars/&source=gmail&ust=1531404720383000&usg=AFQjCNGn_0E4ElJYDOrI3zUIQLqDyL4TNQ" href="https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/russia-paid-donald-trump-millions-of-dollars/" target="blank" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration-line: none;">dropped precipitously in 2014</a> after the U.S. imposed sanctions on Russian oligarchs for the <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-crisis/u-s-eu-set-sanctions-as-putin-recognizes-crimea-sovereignty-idUSBREA1Q1E820140317&source=gmail&ust=1531404720383000&usg=AFQjCNH9bjR5talWt6faChsDebGBc1nmSw" href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-crisis/u-s-eu-set-sanctions-as-putin-recognizes-crimea-sovereignty-idUSBREA1Q1E820140317" target="blank" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration-line: none;">Crimean incursion</a>. Lifting sanctions would likely restore these sales, and the profits would flow through a trust run by Trump's sons, with the president as sole beneficiary. Indeed, Trump <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/russia-paid-donald-trump-millions-of-dollars/&source=gmail&ust=1531404720383000&usg=AFQjCNGn_0E4ElJYDOrI3zUIQLqDyL4TNQ" href="https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/russia-paid-donald-trump-millions-of-dollars/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">admitted</a> that he’d “be looking at” lifting them.Trump has many business aspirations in Russia that Putin can make or break. In 1986, Trump <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-history-of-donald-trumps-business-dealings-in-russia/2017/11/02/fb8eed22-ba9e-11e7-be94-fabb0f1e9ffb_story.html?noredirect%3Don%26utm_term%3D.c3fd45d0cbf8&source=gmail&ust=1531404720383000&usg=AFQjCNHo93b2Eimr30aQmrLtBTBXFx8K_g" href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-history-of-donald-trumps-business-dealings-in-russia/2017/11/02/fb8eed22-ba9e-11e7-be94-fabb0f1e9ffb_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.c3fd45d0cbf8" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">met with</a> the Soviet ambassador about building a luxury hotel in Moscow, and announced a potential Trump International complex there. At the 2008 Russian Real Estate Summit, Trump touted plans for condos and hotels in <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-history-of-donald-trumps-business-dealings-in-russia/2017/11/02/fb8eed22-ba9e-11e7-be94-fabb0f1e9ffb_story.html?noredirect%3Don%26utm_term%3D.992b3c141412&source=gmail&ust=1531404720383000&usg=AFQjCNGChTIHa5ehLkOQbN3VfmWthQb1aw" href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-history-of-donald-trumps-business-dealings-in-russia/2017/11/02/fb8eed22-ba9e-11e7-be94-fabb0f1e9ffb_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.992b3c141412" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Moscow, St. Petersburg and Sochi</a>. In 2011, he licensed his name to an aborted Azerbaijan hotel for <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/21/trumps-business-of-corruption&source=gmail&ust=1531404720383000&usg=AFQjCNGeolThl3Mv9p-rhCPqkkuNXH7Q0A" href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/21/trumps-business-of-corruption" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">$1 million</a> and promoted a <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/21/trumps-business-of-corruption&source=gmail&ust=1531404720383000&usg=AFQjCNGeolThl3Mv9p-rhCPqkkuNXH7Q0A" href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/21/trumps-business-of-corruption" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Trump Tower in Kazakhstan</a>. Even as he campaigned for the Republican nomination, Trump signed a <a href="https://www.rawstory.com/2018/05/revealed-trump-signed-letter-intent-trump-tower-moscow-campaigning-president/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">letter of intent</a> to build Trump Tower in Moscow.Trump’s business depends heavily on Russian money. Donald Trump Jr. <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=//www.newsweek.com/g00/2017/12/29/donald-trump-russia-secret-deutsche-bank-753780.html?i10c.encReferrer%3D%26i10c.ua%3D1%26i10c.dv%3D14&source=gmail&ust=1531404720383000&usg=AFQjCNFba3NPyrE35KunPBobysH8Rxymjg" href="https://www.newsweek.com/g00/2017/12/29/donald-trump-russia-secret-deutsche-bank-753780.html?i10c.encReferrer=&i10c.ua=1&i10c.dv=14" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">said</a> in 2008 that “Russians make up a … disproportionate cross-section of … our assets,” and later added, “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.” Eric Trump <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=//www.wbur.org/onlyagame/2017/05/05/james-dodson-donald-trump-golf&source=gmail&ust=1531404720383000&usg=AFQjCNHY6Gys11bCaRrdFdJ661Lc_Jkp6A" href="https://www.wbur.org/onlyagame/2017/05/05/james-dodson-donald-trump-golf" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">told</a> a journalist, “We don’t rely on American banks; we have all the funding we need out of Russia.” (He later <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=//www.wbur.org/onlyagame/2017/05/08/eric-trump-russia-golf-course-funding&source=gmail&ust=1531404720383000&usg=AFQjCNGwAWrd2twNdg1i5EvQC0IvxWpoSw" href="https://www.wbur.org/onlyagame/2017/05/08/eric-trump-russia-golf-course-funding" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">denied</a> saying that.)In 2008, Deutsche Bank’s real estate group <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=//www.newsweek.com/2017/12/29/donald-trump-russia-secret-deutsche-bank-753780.html&source=gmail&ust=1531404720383000&usg=AFQjCNGJW8Ip3VhIWIr8eFlu6XT-lbsyRw" href="https://www.newsweek.com/2017/12/29/donald-trump-russia-secret-deutsche-bank-753780.html" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">stopped lending</a> to Trump after he defaulted on a $330 million loan. Inexplicably, he subsequently borrowed $75 million from another DB group. European and American regulators punished DB for laundering billions from Moscow. It’s not a huge leap to suspect that Trump’s DB money came from Russia.The blackmail potential in all these financial shenanigans is abundant. Implicating Trump in almost any of these schemes could expose him to charges of money laundering and bank fraud.Since Trump’s nomination, 70 percent of Trump sales were to limited liability companies <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-trump-property/&source=gmail&ust=1531404720383000&usg=AFQjCNGxEhETG7ho1JeFvYkhYtgYltDSPg" href="https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-trump-property/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">frequently used by Russians to hide their identity, stow cash</a> and, most likely, violate U.S. sanctions. Hundreds of millions of dollars <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/russia-inquiry-donald-trump-fire-and-fury-congress-kremlin-house-of-representatives-politicians-a8170456.html&source=gmail&ust=1531404720383000&usg=AFQjCNH1IrKXHIXCYbCgVjPXB1dOPw5puA" href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/russia-inquiry-donald-trump-fire-and-fury-congress-kremlin-house-of-representatives-politicians-a8170456.html" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">from unidentified sources</a> funded Trump’s <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://thegolfnewsnet.com/golfnewsnetteam/2018/01/19/donald-trump-money-laundering-scotland-ireland-golf-properties-108118/&source=gmail&ust=1531404720383000&usg=AFQjCNFV5CAnFxx9Z_2_zNMbXbtWr61CSw" href="https://thegolfnewsnet.com/golfnewsnetteam/2018/01/19/donald-trump-money-laundering-scotland-ireland-golf-properties-108118/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">unprofitable</a> golf courses in Ireland and Scotland. Testimony before Congress suggests they were used to launder money for the Russian mafia. Steve Bannon <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-first-year-anniversary-russia-probe-mueller-investigation-latest-a8167511.html&source=gmail&ust=1531404720383000&usg=AFQjCNFEUyuU2CGytH8du7E81pe3VdNjvQ" href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-first-year-anniversary-russia-probe-mueller-investigation-latest-a8167511.html" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">told Michael Wolff</a>, in speaking of White House corruption: “This is about money laundering … the path to …Trump goes right through Paul Manafort, Don Junior and Jared Kushner.”“America first” ideology has actually put Russia first. Leaving the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Iran nuclear deal and Paris Climate Agreement lost America international forums where it communicated, led and influenced. Cutting <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/12/17004372/trump-budget-state-department-defense-cuts&source=gmail&ust=1531404720383000&usg=AFQjCNHe51jMM5EHjOERhouTVohEEtiidQ" href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/12/17004372/trump-budget-state-department-defense-cuts" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">the State Department’s budget</a> and <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/head-of-usaid-defends-big-cuts-in-foreign-aid-budget/2018/03/21/a34cbf26-2d27-11e8-8ad6-fbc50284fce8_story.html?utm_term%3D.4e0aa9b146c4&source=gmail&ust=1531404720383000&usg=AFQjCNG-MjoODWcwJU1GoivP2Telxt44fg" href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/head-of-usaid-defends-big-cuts-in-foreign-aid-budget/2018/03/21/a34cbf26-2d27-11e8-8ad6-fbc50284fce8_story.html?utm_term=.4e0aa9b146c4" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">foreign aid</a> weakened America’s global clout and allowed Putin to <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=//thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/foreign-policy/345785-china-russia-are-exploiting-vacuums-left-by-trumps-america&source=gmail&ust=1531404720383000&usg=AFQjCNFJSpNLeXXOIoOINkw-Q-LmQ4PHRg" href="https://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/foreign-policy/345785-china-russia-are-exploiting-vacuums-left-by-trumps-america" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">expand Russia's sphere of influence</a>.Trump’s <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://theglobalamericans.org/2017/06/deep-dive-trump-cuts-latin-america/&source=gmail&ust=1531404720383000&usg=AFQjCNE8AQQQGGokXLFw74RovRe2DJQOOg" href="https://theglobalamericans.org/2017/06/deep-dive-trump-cuts-latin-america/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">threat</a> to cut aid to Central America damaged trust in the U.S. Now Putin is <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-05/russia-and-china-are-bulking-up-in-the-u-s-s-backyard&source=gmail&ust=1531404720383000&usg=AFQjCNEhwqNpMePxgMdDVVUmflfCUKL6VQ" href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-05/russia-and-china-are-bulking-up-in-the-u-s-s-backyard" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">providing aid</a> there, reopening <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-05/russia-and-china-are-bulking-up-in-the-u-s-s-backyard&source=gmail&ust=1531404720384000&usg=AFQjCNFw_FnIgkneMDsdLitcXarhAliLsQ" href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-05/russia-and-china-are-bulking-up-in-the-u-s-s-backyard" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">military bases</a> and building a <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-05/russia-and-china-are-bulking-up-in-the-u-s-s-backyard&source=gmail&ust=1531404720384000&usg=AFQjCNFw_FnIgkneMDsdLitcXarhAliLsQ" href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-05/russia-and-china-are-bulking-up-in-the-u-s-s-backyard" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">satellite-tracking station</a> that could spy on the U.S. Trump’s rejection of Obama’s soft Cuba policy may result in a repeat of Cuba’s pivot to Russia after Dwight Eisenhower rejected Cuban efforts for diplomatic and trade ties. Trump’s trade tariffs and insults of EU and Canadian leaders threatens relationships with our closest allies. His escalating criticism of NATO make <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://www.wsj.com/articles/europe-ponders-new-world-order-as-trans-atlantic-ties-fray-1528795800&source=gmail&ust=1531404720384000&usg=AFQjCNFF14klIcGaDLIxrn3vDTb53Y0agg" href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/europe-ponders-new-world-order-as-trans-atlantic-ties-fray-1528795800" target="blank" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration-line: none;">some worry</a> the United States might actually leave the alliance – the ultimate gift to Putin.Congressional Republicans are muting their nervousness about Trump giving away the store, settling for <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/07/08/chuck_todd_to_roy_blunt_do_you_worry_trump_could_hand_crimea_to_the_russians_at_putin_meeting.html&source=gmail&ust=1531404720384000&usg=AFQjCNFOdTB6SungG-18yYF52NtTRUnuFg" href="https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/07/08/chuck_todd_to_roy_blunt_do_you_worry_trump_could_hand_crimea_to_the_russians_at_putin_meeting.html" target="blank" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration-line: none;">bromides</a> about how there's nothing wrong with just talking to Russia. It's hard to imagine how talking under these conditions will serve America's interest, but on the other hand, we may finally see Trump Tower built in Moscow. In keeping his <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=//thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/the-administration/341534-every-american-must-be-a-watchdog-to-trumps-conflicts&source=gmail&ust=1531404720384000&usg=AFQjCNGUpoyEykPjvwD_2yjD_s7FU053Vw" href="https://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/the-administration/341534-every-american-must-be-a-watchdog-to-trumps-conflicts" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">stakes in 500 foreign businesses</a> -- no other president had any – Trump has unprecedented cause to tailor foreign policy for personal gain. He promised to “drain the swamp,” but there are more reptiles in it than ever, and many speak Russian
</div><div>=</div><div>
</div><div>https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2018/06/kim-kardashian-donald-trump-alice-johnson-pardon</div><div>
</div><div>C.F.D.A. was onto something when they gave Kim Kardashian the <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2018/06/cfda-awards-2018-recap" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">Influencer Award</a> on Monday. On Wednesday, <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/people/donald-trump#intcid=dt-hot-link" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">Donald Trump</a>announced that he would be granting clemency to Alice Johnson, a 63-year-old woman who has been serving a life sentence for a one-time nonviolent drug charge since 1996. The news comes less than a week after Kardashian met with Trump <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/05/keeping-up-with-the-kushners-kim-kardashian-white-house-visit-prison-reform" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">to discuss prison reform</a> and the possibility of Johnson’s release.“Ms. Johnson has accepted responsibility for her past behavior and has been a model prisoner over the past two decades,” the White House said <a href="https://people.com/politics/kim-kardashian-trump-pardons-great-grandmother-alice-johnson/" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">in a statement</a> on Wednesday. “While this Administration will always be very tough on crime, it believes that those who have paid their debt to society and worked hard to better themselves while in prison deserve a second chance.”Kardashian thanked Trump and <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/people/jared-kushner#intcid=dt-hot-link" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">Jared Kushner</a> on Twitter after the news broke, <a href="https://twitter.com/KimKardashian/status/1004412120795172866" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">writing</a>, “So grateful to @realDonaldTrump, Jared Kushner & to everyone who has showed compassion & contributed countless hours to this important moment for Ms. Alice Marie Johnson. Her commutation is inspirational & gives hope to so many others who are also deserving of a second chances<a href="https://twitter.com/KimKardashian/status/1004412177376333829" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">he added</a>: “I hope to continue this important work by working together with organizations who have been fighting this fight for much longer than I have and deserve the recognition.”Kardashian had been <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2018/05/kim-kardashian-jared-kushner" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">in talks</a> with Kushner after learning about Johnson’s case in October via a video posted by Mic. In November, she hired a team of lawyers to bring the case to the White House. After meeting with Trump last week, Kardashian <a href="https://mic.com/articles/189621/exclusive-kim-kardashian-west-speaks-out-on-meeting-with-trump-about-alice-johnson#.cqDwFF6HQ" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">told Mic</a> that he “really spent the time to listen to our case that we were making for Alice. He really understood, and I am very hopeful that this will turn out really positively.”Kardashian later called Johnson to share the news with her.“The phone call I just had with Alice will forever be one of my best memories,” <a href="https://twitter.com/KimKardashian/status/1004426873030479877" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">she tweeted</a>. “Telling her for the first time and hearing her screams while crying together is a moment I will never forget.”</div><div>
</div><div></div><div>...</div><div>hile Kanye West <a href="https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/991476958721556487" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">doubles down</a> on his recent (and bad) <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2018/05/kanye-west-tmz-live-interview" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">opinion on slavery</a>, Kim Kardashian is finding her own cause to champion: working to pardon a 62-year-old woman serving a life sentence over a nonviolent drug offense. <a href="https://mic.com/articles/189162/exclusive-kardashian-west-in-talks-with-white-house-about-pardoning-nonviolent-drug-offender#.FvbMdaxJ3" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">According to Mic</a>, Kardashian has already spoken with Jared Kushner on behalf of Alice Marie Johnson, who had spent 21 years in prison as of October 2017. That same month, Kardashian <a href="https://twitter.com/KimKardashian/status/923360255513264128" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">shared a Mic video</a> on Johnson to her Twitter page writing, “This is so unfair . . .”Kardashian’s team confirmed to Mic that she has been in touch “with the White House and is working to bring Johnson’s case to the president’s desk” in order to arrange a presidential pardon or clemency. In November, she hired a team of lawyers including Shawn Holley, known for her work with celebrity clients including Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, and Snoop Dogg.Kushner has been an unlikely proponent of criminal-justice reform, putting him at odds with Attorney General Jeff Sessions who has been vocal about his <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/jeff-sessions-being-soft-on-sentencing-means-more-violent-crime-its-time-to-get-tough-again/2017/06/16/618ef1fe-4a19-11e7-9669-250d0b15f83b_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.134903e52c15" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">tough-on-crime approach</a>. Kushner and his wife, <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/people/ivanka-trump#intcid=dt-hot-link" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">Ivanka Trump</a>, have <a href="https://www.axios.com/jared-and-ivankas-bipartisan-dinners-1513306046-5e471336-7cdc-4d48-b942-84b809416b63.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">hosted dinners</a>, inviting both Democrats and Republicans to discuss the cause, and they support <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/28/us/politics/jeff-sessions-jared-kushner-prisons.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">a bill</a> that would lighten sentences for nonviolent offenses and promote education, drug rehabilitation, and work training inside of prisons....</div><div></div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/heres-corrupt-financial-web-links-trump-and-kennedy-families" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;" times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/heres-corrupt-financial-web-links-trump-and-kennedy-families</a>AN...Because Trump cares so much about money, that’s been suggested. And there’s smoke: the links between Trump, Kennedy and Kennedy’s son Justin. In years past we’d call that the League of White Men, taking care of their own, behind the scenes, The Way It Is. Today we tend to call it something else: collusion.Here’s why. On the surface, Kennedy’s resignation looked textbook: He’ll leave effective July 31, at the end of the Supreme Court term, as is traditional. But he announced it on June 27. Hand-delivering his letter to the Oval Office was no surprise to the White House, which had a list of candidates ready to roll out. Trump says he’ll announce his nominee on July 9.Why the rush?If Kennedy had waited a few weeks, some analysts believe Trump couldn’t have gotten his successor approved before the midterm elections. If the Democrats did well in November, it’s at least conceivable they could have blocked any conservative nominee. Approving a nominee before November means our likely future has the court <a href="https://www.salon.com/2018/07/02/roe-v-wade-is-likely-dead-what-can-states-do-to-protect-women/" style="text-decoration-line: none;">killing Roe v. Wade</a>, giving more power to corporations, turning the poor and minorities into serfs, exiling or detaining Others the president might choose to torture. That’s huge. But let’s consider the bottom line: For Donald Trump, the only real issue of interest is… himself. If a 4-4 Court had to rule on a difficult question -- Does the president have the power to pardon himself? -- it might not go well for Trump.What started the speculation about dirty money connecting Trump, Kennedy and his son is the revelation that Kennedy and Trump have had a longstanding relationship through their children and their children’s success. We knew about Trump’s dealings with Deutsche Bank, the only bank willing to do business with him. (It’s also, perhaps not coincidentally, the bank that seems to have the longest illegal relationship with laundered Russian money. In January 2017, it was fined $425 million by New York regulators to settle allegations that it helped Russian investors launder as much as $10 billion through its branches in Moscow, New York and London.) But we’re just finding out about the Trump relationship with Justin Kennedy, the justice’s son, who worked at Deutsche Bank for a decade.Kennedy is bookish and abstract, while Mr. Trump is earthy and direct. But they had a connection, one Mr. Trump was quick to note in the moments after his first address to Congress in February 2017. As he made his way out of the chamber, Mr. Trump paused to chat with the justice.Media speculation about Trump’s surprising relationship with Justice Kennedy <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/28/us/politics/trump-anthony-kennedy-retirement.html" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">started</a> with the New York Times:<blockquote style="">“Say hello to your boy,” Mr. Trump said. “Special guy.”Mr. Trump was apparently referring to Justice Kennedy’s son, Justin. The younger Mr. Kennedy spent more than a decade at Deutsche Bank, eventually rising to become the bank’s global head of real estate capital markets, and he worked closely with Mr. Trump when he was a real estate developer, according to two people with knowledge of his role.During Mr. Kennedy’s tenure, Deutsche Bank became Mr. Trump’s most important lender, dispensing well over $1 billion in loans to him for the renovation and construction of skyscrapers in New York and Chicago at a time other mainstream banks were wary of doing business with him because of his troubled business history.</blockquote>There’s more. New York is a set of villages. The Trumps and Kennedys live in the same one. As C’Zar Bernstein and Gabe Rusk wrote in a little-noticed <a href="https://medium.com/@gaberusk/the-kennedy-kushner-and-trump-connection-a-curious-conversation-and-a-business-deal-c81dd578ce83" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">March 2017 article</a>:<blockquote style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">-- At the invitation of Justice Kennedy, Donald Trump’s daughter and former businesswoman Ivanka Trump visited the High Court with her daughter to attend a Supreme Court argument.-- According to reports, Kennedy and Ivanka had met at the congressional lunch after the inauguration.</blockquote>But as Stephanie Ruhle of MSNBC has reported, Justin Kennedy left Deutsche Bank long before the money laundering and had no direct connection to the bank's loans to Trump. The more interesting fact is where Justin Kennedy went next -- he became the co-CEO of LNR Property. And that brings us straight to the most immediately vulnerable member of the Trump family, Jared Kushner.From the New York Times, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/18/realestate/commercial/the-kushner-companies-deal-for-666-fifth-avenue-avoids-foreclosure.html" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">in 2012</a>:<blockquote style="">The Kushners' purchase in 2007 of 666 Fifth Avenue for a record price of $1.8 billion is considered a classic example of reckless underwriting. The transaction was so highly leveraged that the cash flow from rents amounted to only 65 percent of the debt service.</blockquote><blockquote style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">As many real estate specialists predicted, the deal ran into trouble. Instead of rising, rents declined as the recession took hold, and new leases were scarce. In 2010, the loan was transferred to a special servicer on the assumption that a default would occur once reserve funds being used to subsidize the shortfall were bled dry.Instead of foreclosing on the 39-story building, which stretches from 52nd Street to 53rd Street, the lenders agreed last month to reduce the principal and defer some of the interest payments on the interest-only loan and extend its maturity for two years, until February 2019.Vornado has taken an ownership stake in several troubled Manhattan properties. But the <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://maps.google.com/?q%3D666%2BFifth%26entry%3Dgmail%26source%3Dg&source=gmail&ust=1530627842103000&usg=AFQjCNEVI7vnetnaTvvwzY6PH9kSNJiT8w" href="https://maps.google.com/?q=666+Fifth&entry=gmail&source=g" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">666 Fifth</a> deal raised some eyebrows because Vornado is also a part-owner of the special servicer on the loan, LNR Partners, of Miami Beach.</blockquote>The plot thickens. As Bernstein and Rusk note:<blockquote style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">-- There was a direct business relationship between LNR and Kushner Companies at the time Justin Kennedy and Jared Kushner were both CEOs. Even the future President was aware of the deal and commented on its respective merits.-- In 2011, the year in which some of these negotiations took place, Justin Kennedy for the first time was ranked on the New York Observer’s 100 Most Powerful People in New York Real Estate at #36. Donald Trump clocked in at #12. At that time, The New York Observer was owned by Jared Kushner.</blockquote>The <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://maps.google.com/?q%3D666%2BFifth%2BAvenue%26entry%3Dgmail%26source%3Dg&source=gmail&ust=1530627842103000&usg=AFQjCNHQGDmhNr7rimIPj5mPzm5Lcrylgg" href="https://maps.google.com/?q=666+Fifth+Avenue&entry=gmail&source=g" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">666 Fifth Avenue</a> deal is generally regarded as the all-time stinker in New York commercial real estate. What did LNR see as the upside? Better question: Was there any upside? As we know, <a href="https://maps.google.com/?q=666+Fifth+Avenue&entry=gmail&source=g" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">666 Fifth Avenue</a> went badly for the Kushners, so badly that they were scrambling for a partner. Where might one be?The Intercept <a href="https://theintercept.com/2018/03/02/jared-kushner-real-estate-qatar-blockade/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">reported</a> earlier this year that Charles Kushner, Jared's father, had discussed a financing deal for 666 Fifth Avenue with Qatari finance minister Ali Sharif Al Emadi in April 2017. A month after that deal cratered, a group of Middle Eastern countries, with Jared Kushner’s backing, led a diplomatic assault that culminated in a blockade of Qatar. NBC News reported that Qatari government officials visiting the U.S. “considered turning over to Mueller what they believe is evidence of efforts by their country’s Persian Gulf neighbors in coordination with Kushner to hurt their country.”Back in March 2017, when Bernstein and Rusk published their <a href="https://medium.com/@gaberusk/the-kennedy-kushner-and-trump-connection-a-curious-conversation-and-a-business-deal-c81dd578ce83" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Medium article</a>, they ended on a hopeful note:<blockquote style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">We know what the Justice’s son may have done for Mr. Kushner, but what did the President’s children do for Justin Kennedy? How have they been nice to him? Evidently Justice Kennedy knows, and this may have had an impact on his opinion of the Trumps in general and the President in particular. This is perhaps a significant cause of concern for those who hope that Justice Kennedy will try and hold out until after Trump is replaced by a Democrat. Time will tell.</blockquote>Well, time has told. Kennedy didn’t hold out. Although there’s clearly more to this story than an 81-year-old justice who was ready to retire, I’m thinking Anthony Kennedy’s farewell gift to Trump isn’t just right-wing control of the Supreme Court for the rest of most of our lives. For once, it may not be about the money. The real prize here may be a gold-plated Get Out of Jail Free card.AN...relevant part:
According the New York Times, in 2007 Kushner Companies purchased “an aluminum-clad office tower in Midtown Manhattan, for a record price of $1.8 billion.” At the time the NYT wrote that this deal was “considered a classic example of reckless underwriting. The transaction was so highly leveraged that the cash flow from rents amounted to only 65 percent of the debt service.” The Times continues:
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“As many real estate specialists predicted, the deal ran into trouble. Instead of rising, rents declined as the recession took hold, and new leases were scarce. In 2010, the loan was transferred to a special servicer on the assumption that a default would occur once reserve funds being used to subsidize the shortfall were bled dry. But the story may yet have a happy ending for Kushner, a family-owned business that moved its headquarters from Florham Park, N.J., to 666 Fifth, its first major acquisition in Manhattan.”
Who came to the rescue? None other than LNR Property, the company whose CEO at the time was Justin Kennedy. According to the NYT and the Real Deal, Mr. Kushner and LNR “reached a possible agreement with LNR Property, a firm specializing in restructuring troubled debt and which oversees the mortgage, that would allow him to retain control of the tower by modifying the terms of the $1.2 billion mortgage tied to the office portion of the building.” A spokesman for Mr. Kushner told the Wall Street Journal in March of 2011 that “[t]he Kushner’s are ready and willing to invest more money into the property as soon as they can come to mutually satisfactory terms with the servicing agent.” In that same article Kushner’s father-in-law and the future President commented on the negotiations with Justin Kennedy’s company. Speaking about the deal, Trump told the WSJ that Kushner is “a very smart young man…I think it (loan renegotiations) will come out well for him and everybody.” At this point there is no doubt that there was a direct business relationship between LNR and Kushner Companies at the time Justin Kennedy and Jared Kushner were both CEO. Even the future President was aware of the deal and commented on its respective merits. (That being said, it is not impossible that Jared Kushner and Justin Kennedy did not meet in connection with the specific deal in question; however, given the stakes involved it does seem more than likely that the two CEO’s would have interacted as negotiations were being conducted.)
So Kennedy’s son bailed out Jared on the Antichrist property, and also Trump himself while he was at Deutschbank.
In re — this exchange after last year’s SOTU address….
(Justice) Kennedy: [Inaudible]

Report AdvertisementTrump: Very nice, thank you, and coming from you. And say hello to your boy. Special guy.
Kennedy: Your kids have been very nice to him.
Trump: Well, they love him and they love him in New York. He’s a great guy. (Pointing to Chief Justice Roberts) Good swearing-in. You’ve got a good guy.
[Link to video. Readers can listen for themselves at 5:15 remaining]
We know how Kennedy’s son was nice to Trump and ...<a href="https://www.alternet.org/white-house-edits-transcript-jared-kushner-calling-protestors-gaza-part-problem">https://www.alternet.org/white-house-edits-transcript-jared-kushner-calling-protestors-gaza-part-problem</a>mojo nraMay 2016: In an email to Trump campaign aide Rick Dearborn, with the subject line “Kremlin Connection,” Erickson says Russia is “quietly but actively seeking a dialogue with the U.S.” and proposes using the NRA convention to set up “first contact” with the Trump team. According to a New York Times report, Erickson writes that he’s in a position to “slowly begin cultivating a back-channel to President Putin’s Kremlin.” The email doesn’t name Torshin but appears to reference him as “President Putin’s emissary” who planned to attend a dinner hosted by conservative Christian activist Rick Clay. Meanwhile, Clay sends an email to Dearborn with the subject line “Russian backdoor overture and dinner invite,” seeking a meeting between Trump and Torshin. Dearborn forwards Clay’s email to Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who reportedly nixes the proposal.jared pal (po'd qattar did not fund real estate, dad sez wd refuse $<a href="https://www.democracynow.org/2018/3/22/reformer_or_war_criminal_saudi_crown">https://www.democracynow.org/2018/3/22/reformer_or_war_criminal_saudi_crown </a>President Trump met with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at the White House, where the two leaders finalized a $12.5 billion weapons deal. This comes less than a year after Trump announced a $110 billion arms deal with the Saudis. During the meeting, Trump held up posters of recent Saudi weapon purchases from the United States and said, “We make the best equipment in the world.” Human rights groups warn the massive arms deal may make the United States complicit in war crimes committed in the Saudi-led bombing campaign in Yemen. We speak with Al Jazeera’s Mehdi Hasan and Medea Benjamin of CodePink....dad charlie fire comey to keep fbi out of money laundering?<a href="https://www.alternet.org/environment/how-chilean-billionaire-could-poison-minnesota-wilderness">https://www.alternet.org/environment/how-chilean-billionaire-could-poison-minnesota-wilderness</a>12/17bannon  on ropes w/ moore loss thus desperate? cf prop/spin --> deflection /chaos theory of chomsky et al:<a href="https://www.alternet.org/right-wing/steve-bannon-savages-javanka-laying-bare-white-house-tensions">https://www.alternet.org/right-wing/steve-bannon-savages-javanka-laying-bare-white-house-tensions</a>guard uk reporter: Trump’s daughter Ivanka and her husband <a data-component="auto-linked-tag" data-link="" href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/jared-kushner" name="auto-linked-tag" id="auto-linked-tag" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Jared Kushner</a> are under fresh scrutiny over their influence at the White House after a very public eruption of their feud with former chief strategist Steve Bannon.In a gloves-off <a data-link="" href="https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/12/bannon-for-president-trump-kushner-ivanka" name="in body link" id="in body link" style="text-decoration-line: none;">interview with Vanity Fair magazine,</a> Bannon laid bare the mutual enmity with the senior advisers to the president, one of the worst-kept secrets of the Trump administration.“The railhead of all bad decisions is the same railhead: Javanka,” he said, using a nickname that conflates the couple.Bannon, who returned to rightwing site Breitbart News after being forced out of the White House in August, recalled an Oval Office meeting in which he accused Ivanka of being “the queen of leaks”. The first daughter allegedly retorted: “You’re a fucking liar!”He also condemned Ivanka over her handling of the recent US Senate special election in Alabama, where Republican candidate Roy Moore denied accusations of sexual misconduct with teenagers. Ivanka said pointedly during the campaign: “There is a special place in hell for people who prey on children.”Bannon, who supported Moore despite the allegations only to see him lose the Republican heartland to a Democrat, responded in the Vanity Fair interview: “What about the allegations about her dad and that 13-year-old?” – a reference to an unproven allegation from a California woman that Trump raped her as a teenager (last year the woman <a data-link="" href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/04/donald-trump-teenage-rape-accusations-lawsuit-dropped" name="in body link" id="in body link" style="text-decoration-line: none;">dropped</a> a lawsuit making the claim). Trump has faced<a data-link="" href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/nov/30/donald-trump-sexual-misconduct-allegations-full-list" name="in body link" id="in body link" style="text-decoration-line: none;"> multiple claims of sexual misconduct</a> and denies all of them.Bannon added to Vanity Fair: “Ivanka was a fount of bad advice during the campaign.”As for Kushner, Bannon made little attempt to disguise his contempt. “He doesn’t know anything about the hobbits or the deplorables” – using two ironic terms for Trump supporters.It was Kushner who reportedly encouraged the president to fire FBI director James Comey, a move that could come back to haunt him during the investigation into alleged collusion with Russia in the election campaign. Bannon said: “It’s the dumbest political decision in modern political history, bar none. A self-inflicted wound of massive proportions.”There was never much love lost between Bannon and “Javanka” as, like medieval courtiers, they competed for the ear of the president. Bannon, 64, has an unkempt appearance – one congressman recently remarked that he looks like a “disheveled drunk” – and grew up in a working-class, Irish Catholic family in Virginia. He embodies Trump’s instincts of insurgent nationalism and anti-globalisation and has been accused of stoking antisemitism, which he denies.Kushner is Jewish and, at 36, from a different generation, with a clean-cut smartness that contrasts with Bannon’s scruffiness. The scion of a New York property empire, he was previously a Democratic donor who mingled with the wealthy east coast elites that Bannon despises. Ivanka, also 36, also belongs to the “New York faction” and is seen as the favourite of Trump’s five children.Liberal observers had expressed a hope that “Javanka” would tame Trump’s wilder impulses but there have been constant disappointments. The president’s decision to pull the US out of the Paris climate deal was a notable victory for Bannon.Rick Tyler, a Republican analyst and co-founder of consulting firm Foundry Strategies, said: “These things are very difficult when family is involved with any elected official. They have a different relationship with the principal and it’s very difficult to work around if there’s a problem.Ivanka came under fire this week after promoting Republicans’ sweeping tax reform, her father’s first major legislative achievement. During a sycophantic interview by Fox News, which praised her for securing an increase in the child tax credit, she claimed: “I’m really looking forward to doing a lot of traveling in April when people realise the effect that this has … The vast majority will be [doing their taxes] on a single postcard.” Critics were quick to point out the postcard was a publicity stunt and a promise that has not been kept.“I don’t know what Jared and Ivanka bring to the administration. Some said they were going to moderate the president and keep him presidential but there’s not much evidence of that. I think a lot of advice they provided to the president has not been good.”A headline in the Washington Post read: <a data-link="" href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2017/12/21/once-again-ivanka-trump-shows-off-her-cluelessness/?utm_term=.7c5ff45f4abd" name="in body link" id="in body link" style="text-decoration-line: none;">“Once again, Ivanka Trump shows off her cluelessness.”</a> Columnist Jennifer Rubin wrote: “She’s a walking advertisement for the danger of nepotism, an exemplar of class privilege and a perfect representative for Republican know-nothingism. She was supposed to be the brains of the family and the moral ballast; instead, she’s a self-righteous enabler.”Kushner, meanwhile, appears to be in retreat. Once ubiquitous, his public appearances have declined. It has been widely reported that his gigantic portfolio has shrunk and his influence is on the wane, raising questions over how long “Javanka” will remain in Washington.This may in part be because of speculation that he will be the next big fish caught in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in last year’s presidential election. There has been a steady drip of revelations about his part in the intrigue. Kushner was also forced to apologise in July for filing incomplete security clearance forms. He has denied any kind of collusion with Russia.Also, according to media reports, Kushner was key to Trump’s decision to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, a move that earned considerable international blowback. This week the UN general assembly voted by a huge majority to reject America’s stance.Tyler, former campaign spokesman for Republican Ted Cruz, added: “Jared has shrunken from the spotlight. He seemed to be seen in every photo and was keenly aware of where the photographers were and what type of lens they were using. But we never heard from him and, when we did, it wasn’t terribly impressive.“Usually when we put people in positions of great responsibility and authority we have knowledge of their commensurate qualifications and experience; with Jared we know of none.”gabe sKushner has tapped his network in an attempt to help his father-in-law. He reached out to hedge-fund billionaire Paul Singer to introduce him to Trump (Singer declined), and during Trump’s feud with Fox, he called Rupert Murdoch to try to make peace (Murdoch told him to deal directly with Roger Ailes). But this is where Kushner’s involvement makes for the strangest of bedfellows. One of Trump’s most prominent endorsers, Chris Christie, happens to be the man who, as U.S. attorney, sent Jared’s father, Charles Kushner, to federal prison for tax fraud, among other felonies, in 2004.=<a href="https://www.alternet.org/kushner-may-drive-out-white-house-counsel-don-mcgahn-who-ready-resign">https://www.alternet.org/kushner-may-drive-out-white-house-counsel-don-mcgahn-who-ready-resign</a><a href="http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/jared-kushners-data-operation-increasingly-suspected-aiding-2016-russian">http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/jared-kushners-data-operation-increasingly-suspected-aiding-2016-russian</a>news regarding Russia’s use of social media platforms to push propaganda and inject false narratives in the U.S. conversation around the 2016 election is now a <a href="http://www.rawstory.com/2017/09/facebook-under-fire-for-taking-russian-cash-for-political-ads-could-get-nailed-with-new-regulations/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">documented fact</a> but it has been an open question as to how Russia’s so-called “troll farms” knew how to target their ad buys.<a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/09/jared-kushner-data-operation-russia-facebook" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">According to a Friday report in Vanity Fair by Chris Smith</a>, investigators increasingly suspect that President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner helped guide Russian operatives to their targets.“Mapping the full Russian propaganda effort is important,” said Smith. “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?”One of Smith’s sources close to the investigations quipped, “By Americans, you mean, like, the Trump campaign?”Rachel Maddow <a href="https://www.rawstory.com/2017/09/maddow-jared-kushner-may-have-helped-russian-operatives-with-targeted-political-ads-on-facebook/" style="text-decoration-line: none;">raised the possibility last week</a> that Kushner and data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica may have been providing Russian intelligence operatives with up-to-the-instant polling data and micro-targeting data for ad buys.“There appears to have been significant cooperation between Russia’s online propaganda machine and individuals in the United States who were knowledgeable about where to target the disinformation,” said the MSNBC host.It’s unclear where Cambridge Analytica entered the picture, Smith noted, but the company is heavily funded by billionaire Republican power donors Robert and Rebekah Mercer, the shadowy team who have poured millions into ultra-conservative causes and media organizations.The Mercers are credited with helping turn the Trump campaign around in the eleventh hour by bringing in media mouthpiece Kellyanne Conway and now-ousted chief strategist Steve Bannon.House Intelligence Committee member Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA) has said in the past, “I think the Russians had help” from inside the U.S. in its efforts. “I’ve always wondered if Cambridge Analytica was part of that.”“No evidence has emerged to link Kushner, Cambridge Analytica, or Manafort to the Russian election-meddling enterprise; all have denied colluding with foreign agents,” Smith said. “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 former defense official under the Obama administration Mike Carpenter. “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.”
dn joshua green, the Mercers were big backers of Trump. They were originally behind Cruz, but once he fell, they got behind Trump right away, in a way that a lot of other wealthy Republicans were loath to do, giving him money, setting up a super PAC. But Rebekah Mercer, the daughter, who is very aggressive in getting involved in the candidates and causes she backs—I have a scene in the book where she flies out to a Trump fundraiser in Long Island, demands a meeting with Trump—and you can do that if you’ve given him millions and millions of dollars, as the Mercers have—and says, "Look, you’re losing. You’re going to lose this election unless you make a change." And Trump says, "Well, yeah, things aren’t going real well, but..." And she says, "No, you’re losing. And the only way you’re going to win is if you have a radical change. I have a team of people that I think ought to take over your campaign"—Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway and, later, David Bossie, all of them veteran [ANTI-]Clinton activists. And Trump, who was frustrated with his current campaign manager, Paul Manafort, agrees and says, "OK, let’s put them in charge. We need somebody who can hit harder."Bannon is this famously aggressive Breitbart News publisher who would not be held back, has the same instincts as Trump. And people didn’t know it at the time, but Trump had known Bannon for a long time. And lo and behold, we wake up, I think on a Wednesday morning, to this announcement that Steve Bannon, despised by just about everybody in Washington, is now in charge of Trump’s presidential campaign.AMY GOODMAN: And Paul Manafort is out, something he was resisting, and Jared Kushner played a role in that.JOSHUA GREEN: Well, it’s funny. Paul Manafort wasn’t out, originally. And what Trump did was he hired Bannon, I think on a Sunday night, without telling Paul Manafort or anybody else. And there’s a scene in the book, where it’s on a Sunday, and Trump tells Bannon, "OK, you’re in. Drive out to my country club in Bedminster, New Jersey, tomorrow. We’re going to have a senior staff meeting," with Giuliani and Chris Christie and Manafort and all the kind of campaign brain trust. Kushner actually wasn’t there, because he was off yachting in Croatia with David Geffen, so he wasn’t present for that meeting. But at the meeting, Manafort, who still thinks he’s in charge of the campaign, walks into a room and sees Steve Bannon there. And Bannon says, "Hey, I’m kind of joining the campaign."==

<a href="https://www.democracynow.org/2017/7/21/has_jared_kushners_failed_deal_with">https://www.democracynow.org/2017/7/21/has_jared_kushners_failed_deal_with</a>

Qattar feud?

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<div>dad bought way into university? prosecuted by chris christie:</div>

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<div><a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/the-story-behind-jared-kushners-curious-acceptance-into-harvard">https://www.propublica.org/article/the-story-behind-jared-kushners-curious-acceptance-into-harvard</a></div>

<div><a href="https://www.democracynow.org/2017/7/10/award_winning_journalist_amy_wilentz_on">https://www.democracynow.org/2017/7/10/award_winning_journalist_amy_wilentz_on</a></div>

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<div>President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner is, along with Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr., at the center of a shocking New York Times story published Sunday. According to the article, Kushner, Trump Jr. and then-campaign chair Paul Manafort met with a Kremlin-linked lawyer during the 2016 campaign after being promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton at Trump Tower two weeks after Trump won the Republican nomination. Kushner is one of Trump’s senior advisers who has assumed a major diplomatic role in the administration, despite having no previous diplomatic experience. We speak to Amy Wilentz, a contributor at The Nation.</div>

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LAT

<a id="PEBSL000163" title="Donald Trump" href="http://www.latimes.com/topic/politics-government/donald-trump-PEBSL000163-topic.html" style=" text-decoration-line: none;"> Trump</a>’s eldest son, son-in-law and then-campaign chairman met with a Russian lawyer shortly after Trump won the Republican nomination, in what appears to be the earliest known private meeting between key aides to the president and a Russian.

Representatives of Donald Trump Jr. and <a id="PEBS00024" title="Jared Kushner" href="http://www.latimes.com/topic/business/jared-kushner-PEBS00024-topic.html" style=" text-decoration-line: none;">Jared Kushner</a> confirmed the June 2016 meeting to the Associated Press after <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/08/us/politics/trump-russia-kushner-manafort.html" target="_blank" style=" text-decoration-line: none;">the New York Times reported Saturday</a> on the gathering of the men and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya at Trump Tower. Then-campaign chairman <a id="PEGPF00198" title="Paul Manafort" href="http://www.latimes.com/topic/politics-government/paul-manafort-PEGPF00198-topic.html" style=" text-decoration-line: none;">Paul Manafort</a> also attended, according to the statement from Donald Trump Jr.

He described it as a “short introductory meeting” during which the three discussed a disbanded program that used to allow U.S. citizens to adopt Russian children. Russia ended the adoptions in response to American sanctions brought against the nation following the 2009 death of an imprisoned lawyer who spoke about a corruption scandal. Trump Jr. said he invited the other two Americans, was asked to attend by an acquaintance not named in the statement and was not told beforehand with whom he would meet.

“It was not a campaign issue at that time and there was no follow-up,” he said.

Kushner lawyer Jamie Gorelick said her client already disclosed the meeting in a revised filing of a form that requires him to list meetings with foreign agents.

“Mr. Kushner has submitted additional updates and included, out of an abundance of caution, this meeting with a Russian person, which he briefly attended at the request of his brother-in-law, Donald Trump Jr. As Mr. Kushner has consistently stated, he is eager to cooperate and share what he knows,” she said.Unlike Kushner, Trump Jr. does not serve in the administration and is not required to disclose his foreign contacts. The New York Times reported Saturday, citing unnamed people familiar with the matter, that Manafort disclosed the meeting to congressional investigators questioning his foreign contacts.

Manafort helmed Trump’s campaign for about five months until August and resigned from the campaign immediately after the Associated Press reported on his firm’s covert Washington lobbying operation on behalf of Ukraine’s ruling political party. He is one of several people linked to the Trump campaign who are under scrutiny by a special counsel and congressional committees investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 campaign and potential coordination with Trump associates.

</div></aside>

Manafort has denied any coordination with Russia and has said his work in Ukraine was not related to the campaign.

The New York Times said Veselnitskaya is known for her attempts to undercut the sanctions against Russian human rights abusers. The newspaper also said her clients include state-owned businesses and the son of a senior government official whose company was under investigation in the United States at the time of the meeting....

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/kushner-firms-285-million-deutsche-bank-loan-came-just-before-election-day/2017/06/25/984f3acc-4f88-11e7-b064-828ba60fbb98_story.html?utm_term=.57934f36c238

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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.”

Play Video 3:00

Untangling the web of Jared Kushner

What you need to know about Jared Kushner's ties to Russia. (Thomas Johnson/The Washington Post)

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.

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<div>http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/jared-kushner-built-luxury-condos-using-real-estate-grants-earmarked-poor</div>

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<div>fovored paris?</div>

<div><a href="http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/trump-keeps-giving-kushner-jobs">http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/trump-keeps-giving-kushner-jobs</a></div>

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And this tired old GOP mantra about running government like a business is like saying that you should build boats like you wash dishes. They are completely different tasks. And Kushner is a particularly poor choice, even if you buy the argument. As Maloy pointed out, Kushner is a lot like his father-in-law in that he inherited his father’s New Jersey real estate business and, well, that’s about it.

Actually, after Chris Christie put Kushner’s father in jail for corruption (it’s a <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/in-fathers-scandal-the-genesis-of-jared-kushners-unflinching-loyalty/2016/11/27/1e9497ba-b378-11e6-840f-e3ebab6bcdd3_story.html?utm_term%3D.23685e9d3a2f&source=gmail&ust=1490787242633000&usg=AFQjCNE_ELOuTThkc0u6C0vm_tF1Pa9RAQ" href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/in-fathers-scandal-the-genesis-of-jared-kushners-unflinching-loyalty/2016/11/27/1e9497ba-b378-11e6-840f-e3ebab6bcdd3_story.html?utm_term=.23685e9d3a2f" target="blank" style=" text-decoration: none;">long story</a>), Jared took the reins of the business and jumped into Manhattan real estate where he is known for <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/18/realestate/commercial/the-kushner-companies-deal-for-666-fifth-avenue-avoids-foreclosure.html&source=gmail&ust=1490787242633000&usg=AFQjCNEPBVabIsy2UNMa93QJkxkJRut5uQ" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/18/realestate/commercial/the-kushner-companies-deal-for-666-fifth-avenue-avoids-foreclosure.html" target="blank" style=" text-decoration: none;">one very big deal</a>. Unfortunately, also like his father-in-law, it turns out Kushner is not very good at what he does. Kushner <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-22/kushners-troubled-tower-debt-empty-offices-and-rising-fees&source=gmail&ust=1490787242633000&usg=AFQjCNGmO4rcMYbJQf4oxxWdwn8xIhpRUw" href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-22/kushners-troubled-tower-debt-empty-offices-and-rising-fees" target="blank" style=" text-decoration: none;">sold his stake in that project</a> to his family recently, ostensibly to avoid a conflict of interest. It was actually a smart business decision because <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-22/kushners-troubled-tower-debt-empty-offices-and-rising-fees&source=gmail&ust=1490787242633000&usg=AFQjCNGmO4rcMYbJQf4oxxWdwn8xIhpRUw" href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-22/kushners-troubled-tower-debt-empty-offices-and-rising-fees" target="blank" style=" text-decoration: none;">the building’s finances</a> are in big trouble at the moment. The Kushners may receive a <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/14/nyregion/kushner-companies-anbang-insurance-group.html&source=gmail&ust=1490787242633000&usg=AFQjCNFKK3K3zmp7I38lEvvE-1dZtgREMw" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/14/nyregion/kushner-companies-anbang-insurance-group.html" target="_blank" style=" text-decoration: none;">bailout from a powerful Chinese insurance company</a>. So it’s a good thing that we’ve decided that Republicans enriching their immediate family while in office isn’t corruption — or that might look bad.

Kushner’s new job is just an addition to his already bulging portfolio. Recall that a while back he was given the special task of <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=http://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium-1.766226&source=gmail&ust=1490787242633000&usg=AFQjCNFW-Lqdiw-x3x-sCl-43qTkGhzKXg" href="http://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium-1.766226" target="_blank" style=" text-decoration: none;">resolving the Israeli-Palestinian issue</a>. One might assume he’s even less qualified for that job than he is for heading up a “SWAT team” of business leaders, but apparently being an observant Jew is all that’s required. It’s surprising that nobody ever thought of that before.

On Monday we found out <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/03/27/press-briefing-press-secretary-sean-spicer-3272017-29&source=gmail&ust=1490787242633000&usg=AFQjCNGzgn65QmtDky1SM41u4QlqfFkEJg" href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/03/27/press-briefing-press-secretary-sean-spicer-3272017-29" target="_blank" style=" text-decoration: none;">from White House press secretary Sean Spicer</a> that “throughout the campaign and the transition, Jared served as the official primary point of contact with foreign governments and officials until we had State Department officials up.” That’s correct: This 36-year-old with no experience in government or foreign affairs served as the new president’s primary contact with foreign governments. Apparently, no one who knew what he (or she) was doing was available.

This important task seems to have landed young Kushner into a spot of trouble, however. We also learned on Monday that the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is investigating possible Russian ties to the Trump campaign, has asked to speak to Kushner about his meeting during the transition with the Russian ambassador. Apparently there was more than one, including a meeting previously unacknowledged by the Trump administration with a Russian banker named <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/research/stocks/people/person.asp?personId=34816113&privcapId=8793535" target="_blank" style=" text-decoration: none;">Sergey N. Gorkov</a>, head of the state-owned development bank Vnesheconombank, which just happens to be one of the Russian banks facing U.S. sanctions. (Gorkov is reportedly close to Vladimir Putin and graduated from what was formerly the KGB academy.)...

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In January, for instance, Vice President Mike Pence placed a courtesy call to the billionaire megadonor Charles Koch to ask about hiring a speechwriter who had worked in the advocacy network spearheaded by Koch and his brother David. The Kochs and Trump had traded barbs throughout the presidential campaign, with Trump suggesting his rivals were “puppets” of the billionaire brothers. Charles Koch, in turn, compared the choice between Trump and his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton to being asked to choose cancer or a heart attack. His network sat on the sidelines of the presidential race.

Yet Trump’s influential son-in-law Jared Kushner, a top White House adviser who has served as an unofficial liaison to the GOP’s elite donors, reached out to the Koch network during the campaign to set up a meeting, said sources familiar with the call.

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<div class="yiv2146175650item-hed" id="yui_3_16_0_1_1487967969217_84871" style=" -webkit-padding-start: 0px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 22px; margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 7px;"><a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://go.propublica.org/e/125411/l-utm-campaign-dailynewsletter/3shcrn/100414371" id="yui_3_16_0_1_1487967969217_84870" style=" -webkit-padding-start: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; outline: none;">White House Power Player Jared Kushner Is Keeping Parts of His Real Estate Empire</a></div>

<div class="yiv2146175650byline" style=" -webkit-padding-start: 0px; font-style: italic; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 0px; line-height: 1.1;">by Justin Elliott and Al Shaw</div>

Given Kushner’s vast portfolio as an adviser to the president, it’s not clear how he’s going to avoid issues that could affect his bank account. The Trump administration has declined to give details.

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<div><a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/paris-agreement-ivanka-trump-2282312392.html">http://www.ecowatch.com/paris-agreement-ivanka-trump-2282312392.html</a></div>

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<div>...According to the Wall Street Journal's multiple sources, the upcoming executive order targeting Obama-era <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/climate-change/" style=" text-decoration: none; word-wrap: break-word;">climate</a> regulations now excludes any mention of the deal due to the Kushners' intervention.</div>

Saving—or killing—the agreement has been front-of-mind for many interested parties recently: the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Executive Sec. Patricia Espinosa told reporters she is hoping to meet with <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/tag/rex-tillerson" style=" text-decoration: none; word-wrap: break-word;">Rex Tillerson</a> to discuss the deal while she visits Washington next week, while a coalition of 300 high-profile <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/tag/climate-denier" style=" text-decoration: none; word-wrap: break-word;">climate change deniers</a> sent a <a href="http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/320793-climate-skeptics-ask-trump-to-withdraw-from-un-agency" style=" text-decoration: none; word-wrap: break-word;">letter to Trump</a> Thursday asking him to pull out of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change entirely.

Tillerson's successor at <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/tag/exxon" style=" text-decoration: none; word-wrap: break-word;">ExxonMobil</a>, meanwhile, praised the 2015 agreement—and the <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/robert-reich-carbon-tax-2250612264.html" style=" text-decoration: none; word-wrap: break-word;">carbon tax plan</a> rolled out by GOP luminaries earlier this month—in a <a href="https://energyfactor.exxonmobil.com/perspectives/the-future-of-energy-opportunities-and-challenges/#.WK-NoPIkr9t.twitter" target="_blank" style=" text-decoration: none; word-wrap: break-word;">blog post</a> published Thursday.

...

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<div>https://www.democracynow.org/2017/2/2/the_de_judification_of_the_holocaust</div>

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<div>Prominent white supremacist and Donald Trump supporter Richard Spencer has praised Trump for not mentioning in a statement commemorating International Holocaust Memorial Day the 6 million Jews killed. Trump has faced widespread criticism for the omission, but the administration has repeatedly defended the statement. Sen. Tim Kaine went as far as calling it a form of "Holocaust denial." Spencer, however, praised the statement as the "de-Judification" of the Holocaust. We speak to Andrea Pitzer, author of the forthcoming book, "One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps." It looks at mass civilian detention without trial from 1896 to today.</div>

<div>https://www.democracynow.org/2017/2/2/lizzy_ratner_nobody_wanted_to_take</div>

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<div>As attorneys and activists continue to fight Donald Trump’s travel ban on refugees and nationals from seven Muslim-majority countries, a new article takes a sweeping look at history to find what it portends. Perhaps more fascinating is that the story involves the family of one of the senior-most members of the Trump administration. In "Nobody Wanted to Take Us In: The Story of Jared Kushner’s Family, and Mine," Nation magazine senior editor Lizzy Ratner looks at the journey of both her family and that of Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner, the husband of Ivanka Trump. Both Ratner’s and Kushner’s grandparents came to the United States as Jewish immigrants from Poland, as the German occupation was ramping up and U.S. borders were closing down. We speak to Lizzy and play video clips of Jared’s grandmother, Rae Kushner.</div>

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<div>...When I was researching the 1920s and these 1920 anti-immigrant acts that had such gruesome consequences for people, I was struck by the parallels in language. So, you had Jewish people referred to as "physically deficient," "abnormally twisted," "un-American," "filthy," "a peril to this country," sort of a danger in all sorts of ways. Jews were conceived as both a threat to the economy, but also a threat to national security. The idea was that Jews who came from Eastern Europe, which was sort of a hotbed of Bolshevism and radicalism, would come here, turn our country red from the inside out and destroy it. We hear the same or really parallel rhetoric today being thrown against Muslims, people from Muslim countries, who are being sort of described as a threat to our society, a fifth column, Trojan horse. I mean, Donald Trump used the term "Trojan horse." You could have heard that applied against Jews in the 1920s and the 1940s. And I think we can say, you know, horrible things happened to people. Horrible things were visited on immigrants and desperate refugees who wanted to come here.</div>

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go back to Rae Kushner in this interview she did in the Kean University of New Jersey’s Holocaust Research Center.

RAE KUSHNER: Let’s hope it’s not going to happen again. But it can happen, if you don’t watch who comes up. When I came to Washington, the Nazis are going with the swastikas in front of the White House. And they’re going on free. And this scares us. This is very painful.

<a href="https://www.democracynow.org/2017/2/2/lizzy_ratner_nobody_wanted_to_take">https://www.democracynow.org/2017/2/2/lizzy_ratner_nobody_wanted_to_take</a>

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After the 2016 presidential election, President-elect Donald Trump is coalescing a network of supportive right-wing media outlets, including an online publication owned by his son-in-law, a supermarket tabloid, and a new 24-hour news outlet that has been described as “Trump TV.” Since the primaries, these right-wing media outlets have helped push Trump's agenda and have attacked his political opponents.

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<h2 style=" box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 15px 0px; padding: 0px 0px 2px; clear: both; border-bottom: 1px dotted rgb(0, 153, 255);">The New York Observer</h2>

<h4 style=" box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 500; line-height: 1.1; margin: 0px 0px 5px; letter-spacing: 0.1em; padding: 0px 0px 5px; text-transform: uppercase;">CONNECTION: OWNED BY JARED KUSHNER, TRUMP’S SON-IN-LAW</h4>

The Observer is a news site owned by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Under Kushner’s leadership the Observer has been an unabashed pro-Trump megaphone. The paper was <a href="http://mediamatters.org/blog/2016/04/12/trumps-two-publication-endorsements-national-enquirer-and-his-son-law-s-newspaper/209893" style=" box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">one</a> of only <a href="http://mediamatters.org/blog/2016/04/15/rupert-murdoch-s-ny-post-joins-national-enquirer-and-paper-owned-trump-s-son-law-endorsing-trump/209929" style=" box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">three</a> national papers to endorse him during the primary election. The outlet’s close relationship with Trump forced their national political reporter, Ross Barkan, to <a href="http://mediamatters.org/blog/2016/04/13/new-york-observer-reporter-quits-over-paper-s-cozy-relationship-trump/209903" style=" box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">resign</a> because he felt “<a href="http://mediamatters.org/video/2016/04/17/new-york-observer-reporter-who-resigned-over-trump-ties-and-endorsement-me-line-had-been-crossed/209954" style=" box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">a line had been crossed</a>” with both the endorsement and their editor-in-chief’s secret involvement with the campaign.

Since Trump’s victory, the Observer has moved toward becoming a propaganda outlet for the incoming administration. On December 2, the Observer published an <a href="http://mediamatters.org/blog/2016/12/07/news-outlet-owned-trump-son-law-posts-op-ed-calling-fbi-investigation-anti-trump-protests/214747" style=" box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">op-ed</a> from University of Texas-Austin adjunct professor Austin Bay calling for the FBI to conduct a “detailed investigation” into the “political thuggery” of anti-Trump protests after the election.

The Observer also recently <a href="http://observer.com/2016/12/pressure-builds-for-uk-and-sweden-to-release-wikileaks-julian-assange/" style=" box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">argued for</a> the release of Julian Assange. Assange’s organization, WikiLeaks, released -- with the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/08/us/politics/us-formally-accuses-russia-of-stealing-dnc-emails.html?_r=0" style=" box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">probable assistance of the Russian government</a> -- wave after wave of mundane emails stolen from Democratic politicians and operatives, which were endlessly spun by right-wing media into <a href="http://mediamatters.org/research/2016/08/10/fox-right-wing-media-run-conspiracy-linking-clinton-murdered-dnc-staffer/212304" style=" box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">increasingly</a> <a href="http://mediamatters.org/blog/2016/11/22/how-fake-news-articles-fabricated-child-trafficking-story-and-led-death-threats-pizzeria/214602" style=" box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">bizarre</a>, and <a href="http://mediamatters.org/research/2016/12/05/conservatives-downplayed-fake-news-yesterday-it-almost-had-body-count/214712" style=" box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">dangerous</a> misinformation.

<h4 style=" box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 500; line-height: 1.1; margin: 0px 0px 5px; letter-spacing: 0.1em; padding: 0px 0px 5px; text-transform: uppercase;">CONNECTION: HELPED TRUMP WITH PRE- AND POST-DEBATE SPIN; CEO SAID “TRUMP BUILT RSBN”</h4>

Right Side Broadcasting Network (RSBN) is a relatively new “news” network that <a href="http://mediamatters.org/blog/2016/12/06/trump-tv-will-be-white-house-press-briefings/214735" style=" box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">announced</a> on December 6 that it would “become a 24-hour network very soon” and it would be “in the White House” and “at the press briefings” during the Trump presidency. <a href="http://foreignpolicy.com/2010/06/07/can-the-white-house-revoke-a-reporters-credentials/" style=" box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">According to</a> Foreign Policy magazine, there are several steps a news outlet must go through to get White House press credentials, but the president can evade those by simply inviting the outlet to attend and allowing them to ask <a href="http://mediamatters.org/research/2005/02/02/go-ahead-jeff-talon-news-reporter-jeff-gannon-i/132676" style=" box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">friendly</a> questions, as President George W. Bush allowed a conservative reporter to do during his administration.

RSBN developed such a close relationship with Trump during the primary and general elections that The Washington Post’s Callum Borchers has described them as “<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/10/22/trump-tv-already-exists-its-called-right-side-broadcasting/?utm_term=.fb94ce83d2ed" style=" box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">the unofficial version of Trump TV</a>” since last summer. Borchers reported that the Trump campaign had “teamed up with Right Side to produce pre- and post-debate analysis shows that streamed on Trump’s Facebook Page.” Right Side Broadcasting CEO Joe Seales hosted an “ask me anything” session on Reddit in which he told pro-Trump redditors that “<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/4pjlih/i_am_joe_seales_ceo_of_right_side_broadcasting/d4lh6nt/" style=" box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">Trump built RSBN</a>” and they should “<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/4pjlih/i_am_joe_seales_ceo_of_right_side_broadcasting/d4lh8sn/" style=" box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">continue to discredit</a>” mainstream media and instead tune into “<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/4pjlih/i_am_joe_seales_ceo_of_right_side_broadcasting/d4lhe2q/" style=" box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">media outlets like us and the other conservative sources like Breitbart.</a>”

The National Enquirer is owned by David Pecker, Trump’s close friend, and was, along with his son-in-law’s paper and Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, the <a href="http://mediamatters.org/blog/2016/04/12/trumps-two-publication-endorsements-national-enquirer-and-his-son-law-s-newspaper/209893" style=" box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">only other national outlet</a> to endorse Trump. New York magazine’s Gabriel Sherman <a href="http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/10/trumps-alliance-with-the-national-enquirer.html" style=" box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">reported</a> that while Trump’s “scandal-filled personal life would be yuge! for the supermarket tabloid,” he has been “exclusively celebrated in the Enquirer’s pages.” Trump himself has even <a href="http://www.nationalenquirer.com/real-life/donald-trump-writes-exclusively-national-enquirer/" style=" box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">written</a> op-eds exclusively for the Enquirer, where he explained “I am the only one who can make America great again!”

The National Enquirer also undertook a strange and savage campaign against Trump’s electoral opponents. With <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2016/03/ted-cruz-trump-national-enquirer-221241" style=" box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">thin sourcing</a>, often only from <a href="http://mediamatters.org/research/2016/05/09/comprehensive-guide-trump-ally-roger-stone-racist-sexist-conspiracy-theorist/210303" style=" box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">noted liar/Trump supporter Roger Stone</a>, the Enquirer alleged that Jeb Bush celebrated his father’s presidential win with <a href="http://www.nationalenquirer.com/politics/jeb-bush-snorted-cocaine-on-night-his-dad-became-president/" style=" box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">a cocaine binge</a>, that Hillary and Chelsea Clinton “<a href="http://www.nationalenquirer.com/celebrity/bill-clinton-hillary-cocaine-drug-use-scandal/" style=" box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">covered up Bill’s cocaine rehab</a>,” and that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) had <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2016/03/ted-cruz-trump-national-enquirer-221241" style=" box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">affairs</a> with <a href="http://radaronline.com/celebrity-news/ted-cruz-mistresses-revealed-national-enquirer-report/" style=" box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">multiple women</a>. Their most outrageous pro-Trump lie was that Cruz’s father was somehow involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The Enquirer made this claim based on one blurry photograph, but that did not stop Trump from <a href="http://mediamatters.org/blog/2016/05/04/trump-tours-morning-shows-hype-conspiracy-theory-national-enquirer/210220" style=" box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">touring cable news</a> shows to <a href="http://mediamatters.org/video/2016/05/03/watch-fox-friends-hosts-react-donald-trumps-jfk-conspiracy-theory/210187" style=" box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">hype the absurd smear</a>.

<h4 style=" box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 500; line-height: 1.1; margin: 0px 0px 5px; letter-spacing: 0.1em; padding: 0px 0px 5px; text-transform: uppercase;">CONNECTION: OPERATED BY TRUMP’S CHIEF STRATEGIST, STEVE BANNON, WHO DESCRIBED THE SITE AS THE “PLATFORM FOR THE ALT-RIGHT,” WHICH INCLUDES WHITE SUPREMACY</h4>

Breitbart.com was founded by Andrew Breitbart <a href="http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/andrew-breitbart-news-executives-death-301754" style=" box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">along with</a> Trump’s current chief strategist, <a href="http://mediamatters.org/blog/2016/11/13/white-nationalist-who-hates-jews-will-be-trumps-right-hand-man-white-house/214419" style=" box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">Stephen K. Bannon</a>, who in 2014 described Breitbart as the “platform for the alt-right,” a term commonly used to describe people who embrace <a href="http://mediamatters.org/blog/2016/08/25/what-alt-right-guide-white-nationalist-movement-now-leading-conservative-media/212643" style=" box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">white nationalism</a>, misogyny, and anti-Semitism. Breitbart News is <a href="http://mediamatters.org/blog/2016/08/17/breitbart-news-worst-headlines/212467" style=" box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">infamous</a> for headlines like “Bill Kristol: Republican Spoiler, Renegade Jew,” “Young Muslims In The West Are A Ticking Time Bomb,” and “After The Pulse Club Massacre, It’s Time For Gays To Come Home To The Republican Party.” Breitbart even undertook <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/07/13/going-reveal-political-biases-facebooks-trending-news-team/" style=" box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">campaigns of online harassment</a> directed at Facebook’s trending news team for their perceived “bias;” these campaigns were directed by Milo Yiannopoulos, who was <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/twitter-just-permanently-suspended-conservative-writer-milo?utm_term=.kwKVvMJ5E#.fc041V8zb" style=" box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">permanently banned from Twitter</a> for leading a harassment campaign against Saturday Night Live and Ghostbusters actress Leslie Jones.

During the 2016 election, reporters and even former Breitbart employees repeatedly criticized the site for attempting a “<a href="http://mediamatters.org/video/2016/08/28/mtv-news-jamil-smith-breitbart-news-trying-mainstream-white-supremacy-through-trump/212707" style=" box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">rebranding of white supremacy … through Trump</a>.” Former Breitbart writer Ben Shapiro accused the site of <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/08/18/the-breitbart-alt-right-just-took-over-the-gop/?utm_term=.691ce9ec3ef9" style=" box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">embracing</a> “a movement shot through with racism and anti-Semitism,” and his former colleague Kurt Bardella similarly labeled Bannon a “dangerous” and “combative” “<a href="http://mediamatters.org/blog/2016/08/17/former-breitbart-news-spokesman-rails-against-new-trump-ceo-pathological-liar/212472" style=" box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">pathological liar</a>.” Bardella <a href="http://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2016/03/breitbart-spokesperson-parts-ways-with-website-220645" style=" box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">resigned</a> from Breitbart on March 11 when Trump’s then-campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/03/11/video-shows-trump-campaign-manager-corey-lewandowski-grabbing-reporter-michelle-fields.html" style=" box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">grabbed Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields</a> at a Trump event. Rather than defending their Fields, a Breitbart employee hurriedly <a href="http://mediamatters.org/blog/2016/03/11/breitbart-news-text-message-exchange-with-trump/209200" style=" box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">worked</a> to “make sure that [the incident] doesn’t turn into a big story.”

<h2 style=" box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 15px 0px; padding: 0px 0px 2px; clear: both; border-bottom: 1px dotted rgb(0, 153, 255);">Infowars And The Alex Jones Show</h2>

<h4 style=" box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 500; line-height: 1.1; margin: 0px 0px 5px; letter-spacing: 0.1em; padding: 0px 0px 5px; text-transform: uppercase;">CONNECTION: TOP TRUMP ADVISER ROGER STONE IS A FREQUENT JONES/INFOWARS COLLABORATOR AND TRUMP APPEARED ON JONES’ PROGRAM AND PRAISED HIM</h4>

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones is the host of The Alex Jones Show and heads Infowars, which distributes right-wing content through its website and social platforms like YouTube and Facebook. Jones and his website <a href="http://mediamatters.org/blog/2016/12/01/comprehensive-guide-alex-jones-conspiracy-theorist-and-trump-valuable-asset/214668" style=" box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">have pushed</a> false stories and fringe conspiracy theories, including that the government perpetrated the 9/11 attacks and the tragedies at Columbine, Oklahoma City, Sandy Hook, and the Boston Marathon, among others.

Jones and Infowars were a leading source of false stories and conspiracy theories about Clinton in 2016. They pushed false claims about <a href="http://mediamatters.org/video/2016/08/17/msnbcs-maddow-highlights-how-clinton-health-conspiracies-made-their-way-alex-jones-infowars-fox-news/212489" style=" box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">Clinton’s</a> <a href="http://mediamatters.org/video/2016/10/17/huff-posts-sam-stein-trumps-claim-clinton-used-drugs-debates-comes-straight-alex-jones/213871" style=" box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">health</a>, <a href="https://mediamatters.org/blog/2016/12/07/after-pizzeria-death-threats-and-sandy-hook-harassment-indictment-alex-jones-still-pushing-expanding/214749" style=" box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">the “pizzagate” conspiracy</a>, and <a href="http://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2016/11/28/trump-s-fake-election-claims-came-conspiracy-theorist-alex-jones-media-isn-t-reporting/214635" style=" box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">supposed pro-Clinton voting fraud</a>, <a href="http://mediamatters.org/blog/2016/10/11/conservative-media-run-absurd-smear-hillary-clinton-hates-everyday-americans/213748" style=" box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">among</a> <a href="http://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2016/09/08/trump-campaign-runs-alex-jones-conspiracy-about-clinton-earpiece-during-nbc-forum/212925" style=" box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">many</a> <a href="http://mediamatters.org/research/2016/09/29/trumps-debunked-google-clinton-conspiracy-theory-comes-straight-conservative-and-russian-media/213424" style=" box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">others</a>. Several of these stories were subsequently highlighted by Trump on the campaign trail.

Longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone serves as the president-elect’s messenger to Jones’ audience. Stone has been one of Jones’ most frequent guests, helped <a href="http://mediamatters.org/blog/2016/07/17/roger-stones-pro-trump-rally-will-be-freak-show-rnc-circus/211571" style=" box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">organize a pro-Trump event</a> with Jones, and is also an Infowars <a href="https://twitter.com/RogerJStoneJr/status/806580972523229184" style=" box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">guest host</a>. Trump <a href="http://mediamatters.org/blog/2016/12/01/comprehensive-guide-alex-jones-conspiracy-theorist-and-trump-valuable-asset/214668#trump" style=" box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">mainstreamed</a> Jones’ program by appearing on it in December 2015 and telling him: "Your reputation's amazing. I will not let you down." Trump has repeatedly echoed Jones’ rhetoric and <a href="http://www.infowars.com/trump-tweets-infowars-liberals-go-into-meltdown/" style=" box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">he</a>and his <a href="https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&q=from%3A%40DonaldJTrumpJr%20infowars.com&src=typd" style=" box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">campaign</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3A%40AJDelgado13%20infowars.com&src=typd" style=" box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">tweeted</a> links to Infowars.com.

Trump suggested his relationship with Jones will continue: Jones said the president-elect called him after the election to <a href="http://mediamatters.org/blog/2016/11/14/conspiracy-theorist-alex-jones-says-president-elect-trump-called-thank-his-audience/214424" style=" box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">thank</a> his audience and promise he would return to the program. And Stone <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/how-alex-jones-conspiracy-theorist-extraordinaire-got-donald-trumps-ear/2016/11/17/583dc190-ab3e-11e6-8b45-f8e493f06fcd_story.html?postshare=5841479416662824&tid=ss_tw" style=" box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration: none; outline: none; font-weight: 700; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);">said</a> Jones will be a “valuable asset” for “President Trump’s legislative program.”

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