The spy that was in the meeting with them was not one of the 100 #'s that he just added to his list of Russian contacts.
Trump’s Son Met With Russian Lawyer After Being Promised Damaging Information on Clinton
- Thread starter Spectrum
- Start date
Man something tells me that Shep Smith is going to be on MSNBC or CNN soon... This dude has been frustrated since the Debates and Chris Wallace is about to have a heart attack.
Trump Jr.’s Russia meeting sure sounds like a Russian intelligence operation
By Rolf Mowatt-Larssen
July 14, 2017 at 1:48 PM
Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya fits the profile of someone who might serve as a “cut-out” or “access agent” sent to assess and test a high-priority target’s interest in cooperation.(Yury Martyanov/AFP/Getty Images)
Donald Trump Jr. is seeking to write off as a nonevent his meeting last year with a Russian lawyer who was said to have damaging information about Hillary Clinton. “It was such a nothing,” he told Fox News’s Sean Hannity on Tuesday. “There was nothing to tell.”
But everything we know about the meeting — from whom it involved to how it was set up to how it unfolded — is in line with what intelligence analysts would expect an overture in a Russian influence operation to look like. It bears all the hallmarks of a professionally planned, carefully orchestrated intelligence soft pitch designed to gauge receptivity, while leaving room for plausible deniability in case the approach is rejected. And the Trump campaign’s willingness to take the meeting — and, more important, its failure to report the episode to U.S. authorities — may have been exactly the green light Russia was looking for to launch a more aggressive phase of intervention in the U.S. election campaign.
By Rolf Mowatt-Larssen
July 14, 2017 at 1:48 PM
Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya fits the profile of someone who might serve as a “cut-out” or “access agent” sent to assess and test a high-priority target’s interest in cooperation.(Yury Martyanov/AFP/Getty Images)
Donald Trump Jr. is seeking to write off as a nonevent his meeting last year with a Russian lawyer who was said to have damaging information about Hillary Clinton. “It was such a nothing,” he told Fox News’s Sean Hannity on Tuesday. “There was nothing to tell.”
But everything we know about the meeting — from whom it involved to how it was set up to how it unfolded — is in line with what intelligence analysts would expect an overture in a Russian influence operation to look like. It bears all the hallmarks of a professionally planned, carefully orchestrated intelligence soft pitch designed to gauge receptivity, while leaving room for plausible deniability in case the approach is rejected. And the Trump campaign’s willingness to take the meeting — and, more important, its failure to report the episode to U.S. authorities — may have been exactly the green light Russia was looking for to launch a more aggressive phase of intervention in the U.S. election campaign.
Russian Oligarch Who Plotted to Aid Trump Was Named in Private Intelligence Dossier
Robert Mackey
July 11 2017, 8:38 p.m.
Last Updated: 12:04 p.m. EDT
IT TOOK FOUR years longer than he’d hoped, but on Tuesday the Russian oligarch Aras Agalarov finally succeeded in his aim of using Donald Trump to make his son Emin famous in the United States.
The plan was hatched in 2013, when the elder Agalarov paid Trump handsomely to bring his Miss Universe contestants to Moscow, where they were required to swoon in a music video intended to launch Emin’s singing career.
The oligarch even persuaded Trump himself to appear in the video, and arranged for Emin to perform during the pageant’s worldwide broadcast, reportedly dismaying NBC executives.
That capped an extremely high-profile two weeks for Aras Agalarov, who had received the Order of Honor of the Russian Federation from President Vladimir Putin just 10 days before the pageant.
For all that, and despite Trump’s tweets of praise for the father and son, with whom he also hoped to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, the Agalarovs remained relatively unknown outside Russia.
That changed on Tuesday, however, with the release of an email a publicist for the family sent to Donald Trump Jr. on June 3, 2016, offering to pass on secret information about Hillary Clinton from one of the most senior officials in the Russian government.
The publicist, Rob Goldstone, wrote that Aras Agalarov had met that day with Russia’s top law enforcement official, who “offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father.”
Goldstone, a former tabloid journalist from Britain, mistakenly called the official “the Crown prosecutor of Russia,” but he appears to have been referring to the prosecutor general of Russia, Yuri Chaika.
As Julia Ioffe explains in The Atlantic, “Chaika is part of the bloc of siloviki — or people allied with security services, literally the people who settle disputes through force — inside the Kremlin,” and “Putin has willfully turned a blind eye as Chaika’s two adult sons have made a killing, accumulating hundreds of millions of dollars in business and choice government contracts.”
“This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump — helped along by Aras and Emin,” Goldstone added in his email.
Donald Jr. replied enthusiastically to the offer of help — “if it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer” — and met six days later in Trump Tower with Natalia Veselnitskaya, who was described to him by Goldstone as a “Russian government attorney who is flying over from Moscow for this.” Veselnitskaya is also, as the New York Times reports and The Intercept has independently confirmed, a close associate of Yuri Chaika, whose role is equivalent to that of the U.S. attorney general.
While Donald Jr. and Veselnitskaya now maintain that she provided no useful intelligence on Hillary Clinton at the meeting, the Agalarovs seem to have secured a place in American political history by brokering the meeting.
But that family name, and the contours of the plot described in the email, were already well-known to Christopher Steele, the former British spy who spent much of last year compiling a private intelligence dossier on what sources in Russia described to him as a Kremlin operation to help Donald Trump defeat Hillary Clinton.
Steele’s report, commissioned by Fusion GPS, a “strategic intelligence” firm in Washington working for anti-Trump Republicans and Democrats — published by BuzzFeed in January — includes repeated references to intelligence on Clinton gathered by Russian spies during her trips to Russia.
According to Steele’s sources, however, the material did not include details or evidence of embarrassing or unorthodox behavior, but was comprised mainly of bugged conversations during which Clinton made comments “which contradicted her current position on various issues.”
(In a bizarre twist, at the same time that Fusion GPS was paying Steele to investigate possible collusion between Trump and the Russian government, the firm was accused in a complaint filed with the Department of Justice last July of also working with Veselnitskaya to try to have U.S. sanctions on Russian officials lifted.)
Steele reported that at least two sources said that information of some kind on Clinton had been provided to the Trump campaign by Russia. One of those sources, described as “a close associate of Trump who had organized and managed his recent trips to Moscow,” reported in June 2016 “that this Russian intelligence had been ‘very helpful.'”
One of Steele’s sources also claimed that the theft of emails from Democratic officials, later provided to WikiLeaks, “had been conducted with the full knowledge and support of Trump and senior members of his campaign team.”
Stolen emails were not mentioned in the plot to help Trump described to Donald Jr. by Goldstone, but it was just three days after the June 9 meeting with Veselnitskaya in Trump Tower that Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, first revealed that he had obtained what turned out to be emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee.
Later in his report, Steele said that two sources in another Russian city, St. Petersburg, claimed that Trump had illicit sexual encounters there during another trip. Both of those sources claimed that a business associate of Trump, Aras Agalarov, “will know the details.”
Among those entirely unsurprised by the revelation that Agalarov was named at the center of a plot to help the Russian government help Trump was Alexey Navalny, the opposition activist who hopes to run against Putin in the 2018 Russian presidential election.
Writing on his blog, Navalny called the idea of a Putin-Chaika-Agalarov-Trump pipeline “very plausible.”
As Navalny noted, Agalarov seems to be close to Chaika and spoke out loudly in his defense in 2015, when Navalny’s anti-corruption foundation produced a damning investigative report accusing the prosecutor of having abused his position to make his two sons fabulously wealthy.
As The Atlantic’s Julia Ioffe notes, Navalny’s foundation has a political edge, but his reports on powerful Kremlin figures are well-documented pieces of investigative journalism. His report on Chaika showed that his sons “used the protection afforded to them by their father’s office and the prosecutors he oversaw to rig state auctions of choice assets and extort whole businesses from people, including from one man who ended up strangled to death.”
On Wednesday morning in Russia, Aras Agalarov claimed in a radio interview that he does not know Rob Goldstone.
If so, the elder Agalarov must have either a terrible memory or extremely poor vision, since a photograph posted on Facebook by Goldstone on June 16, 2013, shows that the publicist was seated right next his client, Agalarov’s son, and across the table from the oligarch himself, during a working dinner with Trump in Las Vegas, when the family secured the right to host the Miss Universe pageant.
Two more photographs of the dinner posted on Live Journal by Yulya Alferova, an Agalarov employee who worked on the pageant, showed that Aras Agalarov was seated directly across the table from Trump, Emin, and Goldstone.
Aras Agalarov, left, seated across from Donald Trump, during a dinner in Las Vegas on June 16, 2013.
If Aras Agalarov does need to be reminded of who Rob Goldstone is, he could also speak with his wife, Irina Agalarova, since she posted an Instagram photograph of herself “with Rob” at the venue for the pageant on November 6, 2013, three nights before the event.
For his part, Goldstone extensively documented his role at the pageant in updates to his public Facebook account at the time, which were still accessible on Wednesday. Those updates include images taken at the “Agalarov estate,” during the filming of Emin’s music video with Trump, during a post-rehearsal party, and backstage at the pageant.
Goldstone’s Facebook updates from the weekend of the pageant also include images of himself partying on consecutive nights at the Moscow branch of Nobu, which is owned by the Agalarovs, along with Emin Agalarov and his mother, Irina, who was a judge at the contest, as well as the musician Steven Tyler, who performed at the show, and Olivia Culpo, Miss Universe 2012, who was featured in another of Emin’s music videos.
An image Rob Goldstone uploaded to Facebook on November 8, 2013, showed the publicist with his client Emin Agalarov and the star chef Nobu Matsuhisa at Nobu Moscow.
A Facebook image of Emin Agalarov with his mother, Irina, and Steven Tyler, at Nobu Moscow, posted by Rob Goldstone on November 7, 2013.
Rob Goldstone with Olivia Culpo, the 2012 Miss Universe, at Nobu Moscow on November 6, 2013.
As Bloomberg News reported last year, the Agalarovs closed Nobu one night that weekend to host a private party for Trump, where he met “more than a dozen of Russia’s top businessmen, including Herman Gref, the chief executive officer of state-controlled Sberbank PJSC, Russia’s biggest bank.”
Gref, who served as President Putin’s economy minister from 2000 to 2007, told Bloomberg that he had organized the Nobu party for Trump with Aras Agalarov. Sberbank was one of the official sponsors of the 2013 pageant and many of the guests at the Nobu party were bankers.
https://theintercept.com/2017/07/11...aid-trump-named-private-intelligence-dossier/
I said it before
does this look like the type of guy that will stay silent?
6/9/16 @ 2:30p
nah he could be Pres... order and stability always come first before justice
Shep was so flustered he started sounding like a Black dude.
lmbaooo
I caught that too. Nigga started to sound like Jameis Winston before he caught himself. He went back cac immediately with that "tangled web we weave" bullshit tho.
Corporate Executives & Busy Politicians all have 'personal assistants' and/or 'electronic calendars' (or BOTH) to help keep track of all their meetings & events.
There is NO WAY this guy Lewandowski was managing the 'hectic schedule'... OF A PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN... just 'off the top of his head', purely from memory alone... which demands TONS of Airline Travel, Campaign Speeches, TV Appearances, Photo Ops, News Interviews, Debate Preparation, Hand-Shaking & Baby Kissing, Public Relations Appearances, Corporate Meetings, Fundraising Events, VIP Dinners, Policy Meetings, etc.,etc.... EVERY SINGLE DAY... FOR A WHOLE YEAR, OR SO.
The list of things 'to do' every single hour of a Presidential Campaign... is ENDLESS.
In less than 20 seconds, he could've easily checked his 'scheduled meetings' of that day, right before he went on air. (and he probably could've done it with the smartphone sitting in his pocket.
)His "bold-faced" lies are ridiculous.
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Side note... I know we talked about this last year, but I feel like we have to put this WIKI entry about Paul Manafort again, because ALOT of shit is coming to light and this particular section about Paul..... is like fucking Dynamite.
Paul Manafort
Lobbying career
In 1980 Manafort was a founding partner of Washington, DC-based lobbying firm Black, Manafort & Stone, along with principals Charles R. Black Jr., and Roger J. Stone.[1][2][30] After Peter G. Kelly was recruited the name of the firm was changed to Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly (BMSK) in 1984.[4]:124
Association with Pakistani Inter-Service Intelligence Agency[edit]
Manafort received $700,000 from the Kashmiri American Council between 1990 and 1994, supposedly to promote the plight of the Kashmiri people. However, an FBI investigation revealed the money was actually from Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) agency as part of a disinformation operation to divert attention from terrorism. A former Pakistani ISI official claimed Manafort was aware of the nature of the operation.[40] While producing a documentary as part of the deal, Manafort interviewed several Indian officials while pretending to be a CNN reporter.[41]
Lobbying for Viktor Yanukovych and involvements in Ukraine[edit]
Manafort also worked as an adviser on the Ukrainian presidential campaign of Viktor Yanukovych (and his Party of Regions during the same time span) from December 2004 until the February 2010 Ukrainian presidential election[44][45][46] even as the U.S. government (and US Senator John McCain) opposed Yanukovych because of his ties to Russia's leader Vladimir Putin.[18] Manafort was hired to advise Yanukovych months after massive street demonstrations known as the Orange Revolution overturned Yanukovych's victory in the 2004 presidential race.[47] Borys Kolesnikov, Yanukovich’s campaign manager, said the party hired Manafort after identifying organizational and other problems in the 2004 elections, in which it was advised by Russian strategists.[45] Manafort rebuffed U.S. Ambassador William Taylor when the latter complained he was undermining U.S. interests in Ukraine.[32] According to a 2008 U.S. Justice Department annual report, Manafort’s company received $63,750 from Yanukovych's Party of Regions over a six-month period ending on March 31, 2008, for consulting services.[48] In 2010, under Manafort's tutelage, the opposition leader put the Orange Revolution on trial, campaigning against its leaders' management of a weak economy. Returns from the presidential election gave Yanukovych a narrow win over Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, a leader of the 2004 demonstrations. Yanukovych owed his comeback in Ukraine's presidential election to a drastic makeover of his political persona and, people in his party say, that makeover was engineered in part by his American consultant, Manafort.[45]
In 2007 and 2008 Manafort was involved in investment projects with Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska (the acquisition of a Ukrainian telecoms company) and Ukrainian oligarch Dmytro Firtash (redevelopment of the site of the former Drake Hotel in New York City).[49] The Associated Press has reported that Manafort negotiated a $10 million annual contract with Deripaska to promote Russian interests in politics, business, and media coverage in Europe and the United States, starting in 2005.[50]
In 2013 Yanukovych became the main target of the Euromaidan protests.[51] After the February 2014 Ukrainian revolution (the conclusion of Euromaidan) Yanukovych fled to Russia.[51] On 17 March 2014, the day after the Crimean status referendum, Yanukovych became one of the first eleven persons who were placed under executive sanctions on the Specially Designated Nationals List (SDN) by President Obama, freezing his assets in the US and banning him from entering the United States.[52][53][54][55][56][57][58][59][60][61][62][a]
Manafort then returned to Ukraine in September 2014 to become an advisor to Yanukovych’s former head of the Presidential Administration of Ukraine Serhiy Lyovochkin.[46] In this role he was asked to assist in rebranding Yanukovych's Party of Regions.[46] Instead, he argued to help stabilize Ukraine, Manafort was instrumental in creating a new political party called Opposition Bloc.[46] According to Ukrainian political analyst Mikhail Pogrebinsky, "He thought to gather the largest number of people opposed to the current government, you needed to avoid anything concrete, and just become a symbol of being opposed".[46] According to Manafort, he has not worked in Ukraine since the October 2014 Ukrainian parliamentary election.[63][64] However, according to Ukrainian border control entry data, Manafort traveled to Ukraine several times after that election, all the way through late 2015.[64] According to The New York Times, his local office in Ukraine closed in May 2016.[25] According to Politico, by then Opposition Bloc had already stopped payments for Manafort and this local office.[64]
In an April 2016 interview with ABC News Manafort stated that the aim of his activities in Ukraine had been to lead the country "closer to Europe".[65]
Ukrainian government National Anti-Corruption Bureau studying secret documents claimed in August 2016 to have found handwritten records that show $12.7 million in cash payments designated for Manafort, although they had yet to determine if he had received the money.[25] These undisclosed payments were from the pro-Russian political party Party of Regions, of the former president of Ukraine.[25] This payment record spans from 2007 to 2012.[25] Manafort’s lawyer, Richard A. Hibey, said Manafort didn’t receive “any such cash payments” as described by the anti-corruption officials.[25] The Associated Press reported on August 17, 2016 that Manafort secretly routed at least $2.2 million in payments to two prominent Washington lobbying firms in 2012 on Party of Regions' behalf, and did so in a way that effectively obscured the foreign political party's efforts to influence U.S. policy.[10] Associated Press noted that under federal law, U.S. lobbyists must declare publicly if they represent foreign leaders or their political parties and provide detailed reports about their actions to the Justice Department, which Manafort reportedly did not do.[10] The lobbying firms unsuccessfully lobbied U.S. Congress to reject a resolution condemning the jailing of Yanukovych's main political rival, Yulia Tymoshenko.[66]
According to alleged leaked text messages between his daughters Manafort was also one of the proponents of violent removal of the Euromaidan protesters which resulted in police shooting dozens of people during 2014 Hrushevskoho Street riots. In one of the messages his daughter writes that his "strategy that was to cause that, to send those people out and get them slaughtered".[67]
Manafort has rejected questions about whether Russian-Ukrainian operative Konstantin Kilimnik, with whom he consulted regularly, might be in league with Russian intelligence.[68]
Registering as a foreign agent[edit]
Lobbying for foreign countries requires registration with the Justice Department under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). Manafort did not do so at the time of his lobbying. In April 2017 a Manafort spokesman said Manafort was planning to file the required paperwork; however, according to Associated Press reporters, as of June 2, 2017, Manafort had not yet registered.[8][10] On June 27 he filed to be retroactively registered as a foreign agent.[69] Among other things, he disclosed that he made more than $17 million between 2012 and 2014 working for a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine.[70][71]
Homes and home loans[edit]
Manafort’s work in Ukraine coincided with the purchase of at least four prime pieces of real estate in the United States, worth a combined $11 million, between 2006 and early 2012.[72] (Look at these Dates)
Since 2012, Manafort has taken out seven home equity loans worth approximately $19.2 million on three separate New York-area properties he owns through holding companies registered to him and his son-in-law Jeffrey Yohai, a real estate investor.[73] In 2016, Yohai declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy for LLCs tied to four residential properties; Manafort holds a $2.7 million claim on one of the properties.[74]
As of February 2017, Manafort had about $12 million in home equity loans outstanding. For one home, loans of $6.6 million exceeded the value of that home; the loans are from the Federal Savings Bank, whose CEO, Steve Calk, was a campaign supporter of Donald Trump and is a member of Trump's Economic Advisory Council.[73]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Manafort#Lobbying_career
Here is the real real shit..
Chairman of Donald Trump's 2016 United States Presidential campaign[edit]
In March 2016, he joined the presidential campaign of Donald Trump to lead Trump's "delegate-corralling" efforts. In June 2016, Trump fired campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and promoted Manafort to the position. Manafort gained control of the daily operations of the campaign as well as an expanded $20 million budget, hiring decisions, advertising, and media strategy.[19][20][21][22]
An agent of Emin Agalarov reportedly offered Donald Trump Jr. compromising information on Hillary Clinton from the Russian government if he met with a lawyer connected to the Kremlin.[23] On June 9, 2016, Manafort, Trump Jr., and Jared Kushner met with Natalia Veselnitskaya at Trump Tower, where she instead discussed the Magnitsky Act.[24] The Democratic National Committee cyber attacks were revealed later that week.[23]
In August 2016, Manafort's connections to former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and his Party of Regions drew national attention in the USA, where it was reported that Manafort may have illegally received $12.7 million in off-the-books funds from the Party of Regions.[25] On August 17, 2016, Donald Trump received his first security briefing.[26] Also, on August 17, 2016, the New York Times reported on an internal staff memorandum from Manafort stating that Manafort would "remain the campaign chairman and chief strategist, providing the big-picture, long-range campaign vision".[27] However, two days later, Trump announced his acceptance of Manafort's resignation from the campaign after Stephen Bannon and Kellyanne Conway took on senior leadership roles within that campaign.[28][29]
Now let's look at the Wiki page for Trumps former Campaign Manager.... because now Shit is coming to light..
Corey Lewandowski
Trump 2016 presidential campaign
Lewandowski first met Trump in April 2014 at a political event in New Hampshire.[7][23] In January 2015, six months before Trump announced his campaign, Lewandowski was invited to Trump Tower, where he accepted an offer from Trump to become campaign manager.[16] His salary was $20,000 per month.[38]
When Lewandowski was hired, Trump's political staff consisted of three people: his lawyer Michael D. Cohen, veteran operative Roger Stone, and aide Sam Nunberg.[39] In April 2016, another veteran GOP operative, Paul Manafort, was hired; the following month Manafort was named “campaign chairman.”[40] Nunberg was fired in early August 2015;[41] he believes that it was Lewandowski and campaign press secretary Hope Hicks who asked Trump for his ouster.[42] Stone left the campaign a week later.[43]
Departure[edit]
In April 2016, Lewandowski's influence within the Trump campaign was reported to be waning.[58][59]
On June 20, 2016, Trump's campaign announced that it was parting ways with Lewandowski; according to reports, Lewandowski was fired, although Donald Trump Jr., Trump's son, described the split as "amicable."[60][61] The move occurred after Lewandowski clashed with Trump chief strategist and campaign chairman Paul Manafort in an internal "power struggle."[60][61] After Lewandowski's departure, Manafort (who had been brought on the campaign in March 2016) became the de facto campaign manager.[61][62]
So Donald Trump wants to become president... He hires Corey and he is losing. Donald can't stand losing. Somehow (likely through Roger Stone)... Paul Manafort comes in. Paul likely asks Donald how badly he wants to win. Donald says real badly. Paul ends up at this meeting involving a Russian Lawyer that Paul should be very fucking familiar with.. because of his ties to the Ukraine. Corey objects to this new guy and his bitch ass gets fired. I'm sure there is way way way more to this, but this is just the simplest explanation.
Paul Manafort
Lobbying career
In 1980 Manafort was a founding partner of Washington, DC-based lobbying firm Black, Manafort & Stone, along with principals Charles R. Black Jr., and Roger J. Stone.[1][2][30] After Peter G. Kelly was recruited the name of the firm was changed to Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly (BMSK) in 1984.[4]:124
Association with Pakistani Inter-Service Intelligence Agency[edit]
Manafort received $700,000 from the Kashmiri American Council between 1990 and 1994, supposedly to promote the plight of the Kashmiri people. However, an FBI investigation revealed the money was actually from Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) agency as part of a disinformation operation to divert attention from terrorism. A former Pakistani ISI official claimed Manafort was aware of the nature of the operation.[40] While producing a documentary as part of the deal, Manafort interviewed several Indian officials while pretending to be a CNN reporter.[41]
Lobbying for Viktor Yanukovych and involvements in Ukraine[edit]
Manafort also worked as an adviser on the Ukrainian presidential campaign of Viktor Yanukovych (and his Party of Regions during the same time span) from December 2004 until the February 2010 Ukrainian presidential election[44][45][46] even as the U.S. government (and US Senator John McCain) opposed Yanukovych because of his ties to Russia's leader Vladimir Putin.[18] Manafort was hired to advise Yanukovych months after massive street demonstrations known as the Orange Revolution overturned Yanukovych's victory in the 2004 presidential race.[47] Borys Kolesnikov, Yanukovich’s campaign manager, said the party hired Manafort after identifying organizational and other problems in the 2004 elections, in which it was advised by Russian strategists.[45] Manafort rebuffed U.S. Ambassador William Taylor when the latter complained he was undermining U.S. interests in Ukraine.[32] According to a 2008 U.S. Justice Department annual report, Manafort’s company received $63,750 from Yanukovych's Party of Regions over a six-month period ending on March 31, 2008, for consulting services.[48] In 2010, under Manafort's tutelage, the opposition leader put the Orange Revolution on trial, campaigning against its leaders' management of a weak economy. Returns from the presidential election gave Yanukovych a narrow win over Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, a leader of the 2004 demonstrations. Yanukovych owed his comeback in Ukraine's presidential election to a drastic makeover of his political persona and, people in his party say, that makeover was engineered in part by his American consultant, Manafort.[45]
In 2007 and 2008 Manafort was involved in investment projects with Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska (the acquisition of a Ukrainian telecoms company) and Ukrainian oligarch Dmytro Firtash (redevelopment of the site of the former Drake Hotel in New York City).[49] The Associated Press has reported that Manafort negotiated a $10 million annual contract with Deripaska to promote Russian interests in politics, business, and media coverage in Europe and the United States, starting in 2005.[50]
In 2013 Yanukovych became the main target of the Euromaidan protests.[51] After the February 2014 Ukrainian revolution (the conclusion of Euromaidan) Yanukovych fled to Russia.[51] On 17 March 2014, the day after the Crimean status referendum, Yanukovych became one of the first eleven persons who were placed under executive sanctions on the Specially Designated Nationals List (SDN) by President Obama, freezing his assets in the US and banning him from entering the United States.[52][53][54][55][56][57][58][59][60][61][62][a]
Manafort then returned to Ukraine in September 2014 to become an advisor to Yanukovych’s former head of the Presidential Administration of Ukraine Serhiy Lyovochkin.[46] In this role he was asked to assist in rebranding Yanukovych's Party of Regions.[46] Instead, he argued to help stabilize Ukraine, Manafort was instrumental in creating a new political party called Opposition Bloc.[46] According to Ukrainian political analyst Mikhail Pogrebinsky, "He thought to gather the largest number of people opposed to the current government, you needed to avoid anything concrete, and just become a symbol of being opposed".[46] According to Manafort, he has not worked in Ukraine since the October 2014 Ukrainian parliamentary election.[63][64] However, according to Ukrainian border control entry data, Manafort traveled to Ukraine several times after that election, all the way through late 2015.[64] According to The New York Times, his local office in Ukraine closed in May 2016.[25] According to Politico, by then Opposition Bloc had already stopped payments for Manafort and this local office.[64]
In an April 2016 interview with ABC News Manafort stated that the aim of his activities in Ukraine had been to lead the country "closer to Europe".[65]
Ukrainian government National Anti-Corruption Bureau studying secret documents claimed in August 2016 to have found handwritten records that show $12.7 million in cash payments designated for Manafort, although they had yet to determine if he had received the money.[25] These undisclosed payments were from the pro-Russian political party Party of Regions, of the former president of Ukraine.[25] This payment record spans from 2007 to 2012.[25] Manafort’s lawyer, Richard A. Hibey, said Manafort didn’t receive “any such cash payments” as described by the anti-corruption officials.[25] The Associated Press reported on August 17, 2016 that Manafort secretly routed at least $2.2 million in payments to two prominent Washington lobbying firms in 2012 on Party of Regions' behalf, and did so in a way that effectively obscured the foreign political party's efforts to influence U.S. policy.[10] Associated Press noted that under federal law, U.S. lobbyists must declare publicly if they represent foreign leaders or their political parties and provide detailed reports about their actions to the Justice Department, which Manafort reportedly did not do.[10] The lobbying firms unsuccessfully lobbied U.S. Congress to reject a resolution condemning the jailing of Yanukovych's main political rival, Yulia Tymoshenko.[66]
According to alleged leaked text messages between his daughters Manafort was also one of the proponents of violent removal of the Euromaidan protesters which resulted in police shooting dozens of people during 2014 Hrushevskoho Street riots. In one of the messages his daughter writes that his "strategy that was to cause that, to send those people out and get them slaughtered".[67]
Manafort has rejected questions about whether Russian-Ukrainian operative Konstantin Kilimnik, with whom he consulted regularly, might be in league with Russian intelligence.[68]
Registering as a foreign agent[edit]
Lobbying for foreign countries requires registration with the Justice Department under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). Manafort did not do so at the time of his lobbying. In April 2017 a Manafort spokesman said Manafort was planning to file the required paperwork; however, according to Associated Press reporters, as of June 2, 2017, Manafort had not yet registered.[8][10] On June 27 he filed to be retroactively registered as a foreign agent.[69] Among other things, he disclosed that he made more than $17 million between 2012 and 2014 working for a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine.[70][71]
Homes and home loans[edit]
Manafort’s work in Ukraine coincided with the purchase of at least four prime pieces of real estate in the United States, worth a combined $11 million, between 2006 and early 2012.[72] (Look at these Dates)
Since 2012, Manafort has taken out seven home equity loans worth approximately $19.2 million on three separate New York-area properties he owns through holding companies registered to him and his son-in-law Jeffrey Yohai, a real estate investor.[73] In 2016, Yohai declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy for LLCs tied to four residential properties; Manafort holds a $2.7 million claim on one of the properties.[74]
As of February 2017, Manafort had about $12 million in home equity loans outstanding. For one home, loans of $6.6 million exceeded the value of that home; the loans are from the Federal Savings Bank, whose CEO, Steve Calk, was a campaign supporter of Donald Trump and is a member of Trump's Economic Advisory Council.[73]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Manafort#Lobbying_career
Here is the real real shit..
Chairman of Donald Trump's 2016 United States Presidential campaign[edit]
In March 2016, he joined the presidential campaign of Donald Trump to lead Trump's "delegate-corralling" efforts. In June 2016, Trump fired campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and promoted Manafort to the position. Manafort gained control of the daily operations of the campaign as well as an expanded $20 million budget, hiring decisions, advertising, and media strategy.[19][20][21][22]
An agent of Emin Agalarov reportedly offered Donald Trump Jr. compromising information on Hillary Clinton from the Russian government if he met with a lawyer connected to the Kremlin.[23] On June 9, 2016, Manafort, Trump Jr., and Jared Kushner met with Natalia Veselnitskaya at Trump Tower, where she instead discussed the Magnitsky Act.[24] The Democratic National Committee cyber attacks were revealed later that week.[23]
In August 2016, Manafort's connections to former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and his Party of Regions drew national attention in the USA, where it was reported that Manafort may have illegally received $12.7 million in off-the-books funds from the Party of Regions.[25] On August 17, 2016, Donald Trump received his first security briefing.[26] Also, on August 17, 2016, the New York Times reported on an internal staff memorandum from Manafort stating that Manafort would "remain the campaign chairman and chief strategist, providing the big-picture, long-range campaign vision".[27] However, two days later, Trump announced his acceptance of Manafort's resignation from the campaign after Stephen Bannon and Kellyanne Conway took on senior leadership roles within that campaign.[28][29]
Now let's look at the Wiki page for Trumps former Campaign Manager.... because now Shit is coming to light..
Corey Lewandowski
Trump 2016 presidential campaign
Lewandowski first met Trump in April 2014 at a political event in New Hampshire.[7][23] In January 2015, six months before Trump announced his campaign, Lewandowski was invited to Trump Tower, where he accepted an offer from Trump to become campaign manager.[16] His salary was $20,000 per month.[38]
When Lewandowski was hired, Trump's political staff consisted of three people: his lawyer Michael D. Cohen, veteran operative Roger Stone, and aide Sam Nunberg.[39] In April 2016, another veteran GOP operative, Paul Manafort, was hired; the following month Manafort was named “campaign chairman.”[40] Nunberg was fired in early August 2015;[41] he believes that it was Lewandowski and campaign press secretary Hope Hicks who asked Trump for his ouster.[42] Stone left the campaign a week later.[43]
Departure[edit]
In April 2016, Lewandowski's influence within the Trump campaign was reported to be waning.[58][59]
On June 20, 2016, Trump's campaign announced that it was parting ways with Lewandowski; according to reports, Lewandowski was fired, although Donald Trump Jr., Trump's son, described the split as "amicable."[60][61] The move occurred after Lewandowski clashed with Trump chief strategist and campaign chairman Paul Manafort in an internal "power struggle."[60][61] After Lewandowski's departure, Manafort (who had been brought on the campaign in March 2016) became the de facto campaign manager.[61][62]
So Donald Trump wants to become president... He hires Corey and he is losing. Donald can't stand losing. Somehow (likely through Roger Stone)... Paul Manafort comes in. Paul likely asks Donald how badly he wants to win. Donald says real badly. Paul ends up at this meeting involving a Russian Lawyer that Paul should be very fucking familiar with.. because of his ties to the Ukraine. Corey objects to this new guy and his bitch ass gets fired. I'm sure there is way way way more to this, but this is just the simplest explanation.
da fuck? i just relistened to that shit....lmbaoooo... da fuc was that? if you clean, come on clean
And Gawd damn there is more... and this is story is from the conservative as fuck.. "The Hill"
Russian lawyer who met with Trump Jr. was in touch with top Russian prosecutor
BY MAX GREENWOOD - 07/14/17 05:28 PM EDT
© Getty Images
Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who met with Donald Trump Jr. and other Trump campaign members, was in touch with the Russian prosecutor general's office as part of her fight against a U.S. sanctions law, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday.
The White House and President Trump's eldest son have repeatedly said that Veselnitskaya was not working for the Russian government when she met with Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort in June 2016.
Trump Jr. agreed to meet with Veselnitskaya after an intermediary, publicist Rob Goldstone, told him the attorney had dirt on then-candidate Trump's Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton. He also told Trump Jr. that the information was "part of Russia and its government's support for" his father.
But the attorney told The Wall Street Journal that she was in regular contact with the Russian prosecutor general's office and with Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika himself, with whom she shared information about American hedge fund manager William Browder, who pushed for the passage of the sanctions law known as the Magnitsky Act.
“I personally know the general prosecutor,” Veselnitskaya told The Wall Street Journal. “In the course of my investigation [about the fund manager], I shared information with him.”
The Russian prosecutor general's office denied that Chaika had any role in Veselnitskaya's meeting with the Trump campaign members, saying it “does not exchange information and does not conduct any meetings at the international level outside the framework regulated by international legal agreements and Russian procedural legislation.”
Veselnitskaya said she wanted to share allegations with the Trump campaign that an American financial firm that Browder worked with had dodged taxes in Russia and later gave money to Democrats in the U.S.
Trump Jr., however, said his meeting with Veselnitskaya produced no information useful to the Trump campaign and called it a "waste of time."
http://thehill.com/policy/national-...t-with-trump-jr-was-in-touch-with-top-russian
So basically she was a "Off the books" Russian Government Lawyer...
That damn Plausible deniability....
Russian lawyer who met with Trump Jr. was in touch with top Russian prosecutor
BY MAX GREENWOOD - 07/14/17 05:28 PM EDT
© Getty Images
Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who met with Donald Trump Jr. and other Trump campaign members, was in touch with the Russian prosecutor general's office as part of her fight against a U.S. sanctions law, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday.
The White House and President Trump's eldest son have repeatedly said that Veselnitskaya was not working for the Russian government when she met with Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort in June 2016.
Trump Jr. agreed to meet with Veselnitskaya after an intermediary, publicist Rob Goldstone, told him the attorney had dirt on then-candidate Trump's Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton. He also told Trump Jr. that the information was "part of Russia and its government's support for" his father.
But the attorney told The Wall Street Journal that she was in regular contact with the Russian prosecutor general's office and with Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika himself, with whom she shared information about American hedge fund manager William Browder, who pushed for the passage of the sanctions law known as the Magnitsky Act.
“I personally know the general prosecutor,” Veselnitskaya told The Wall Street Journal. “In the course of my investigation [about the fund manager], I shared information with him.”
The Russian prosecutor general's office denied that Chaika had any role in Veselnitskaya's meeting with the Trump campaign members, saying it “does not exchange information and does not conduct any meetings at the international level outside the framework regulated by international legal agreements and Russian procedural legislation.”
Veselnitskaya said she wanted to share allegations with the Trump campaign that an American financial firm that Browder worked with had dodged taxes in Russia and later gave money to Democrats in the U.S.
Trump Jr., however, said his meeting with Veselnitskaya produced no information useful to the Trump campaign and called it a "waste of time."
http://thehill.com/policy/national-...t-with-trump-jr-was-in-touch-with-top-russian
So basically she was a "Off the books" Russian Government Lawyer...
That damn Plausible deniability....
See?
And Gawd damn there is more... and this is story is from the conservative as fuck.. "The Hill"
Russian lawyer who met with Trump Jr. was in touch with top Russian prosecutor
BY MAX GREENWOOD - 07/14/17 05:28 PM EDT
© Getty Images
Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who met with Donald Trump Jr. and other Trump campaign members, was in touch with the Russian prosecutor general's office as part of her fight against a U.S. sanctions law, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday.
The White House and President Trump's eldest son have repeatedly said that Veselnitskaya was not working for the Russian government when she met with Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort in June 2016.
Trump Jr. agreed to meet with Veselnitskaya after an intermediary, publicist Rob Goldstone, told him the attorney had dirt on then-candidate Trump's Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton. He also told Trump Jr. that the information was "part of Russia and its government's support for" his father.
But the attorney told The Wall Street Journal that she was in regular contact with the Russian prosecutor general's office and with Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika himself, with whom she shared information about American hedge fund manager William Browder, who pushed for the passage of the sanctions law known as the Magnitsky Act.
“I personally know the general prosecutor,” Veselnitskaya told The Wall Street Journal. “In the course of my investigation [about the fund manager], I shared information with him.”
The Russian prosecutor general's office denied that Chaika had any role in Veselnitskaya's meeting with the Trump campaign members, saying it “does not exchange information and does not conduct any meetings at the international level outside the framework regulated by international legal agreements and Russian procedural legislation.”
Veselnitskaya said she wanted to share allegations with the Trump campaign that an American financial firm that Browder worked with had dodged taxes in Russia and later gave money to Democrats in the U.S.
Trump Jr., however, said his meeting with Veselnitskaya produced no information useful to the Trump campaign and called it a "waste of time."
http://thehill.com/policy/national-...t-with-trump-jr-was-in-touch-with-top-russian
So basically she was a "Off the books" Russian Government Lawyer...
That damn Plausible deniability....
yo... this is wild... so pretty obvious what is going on here.
1.We give you information to help you win and you remove the sanctions
2. The information helps you win
3. The sanctions aren't lifted
4. Trump meets with Putin in at the G20. Plays nice but lets him know he needs to hold his end of the bargain
5. Send a warning shot with this meeting leak.
this isn't a warning shot... more like Putin sees Trump is useless and now even toxic
cut bait with the added benefit of casting the US into political disarray possible meltdown
man.. what the fuck was that???? that was way too natural man..
To me, this one, single sentence explains EXACTLY WHY Trump Jr. said the whole meeting was... 'a nothing burger'.
There was NO WAY IN HELL that 'Team Trump" could use damaging (tax-related) information against HRC..... at the very same time that Donald himself REFUSED TO SHOW HIS OWN TAXES.
That plan would've BACKFIRED.
IMMEDIATELY. That's why he called the whole meeting... "a waste of time".
Its not that they 'didn't get what they wanted from the meeting"
.... it's that "what they actually got" would've made THEMSELVES look EVEN WORSE, instead. Imagine a Presidential Debate... with Trump onstage 'complaining' that some (DNC-related) company DID NOT pay taxes IN RUSSIA... and HRC responding with "Orly? Nobody even knows if YOU pay taxes IN AMERICA".
Ballgame.
Last edited:
Man on Man... Now that I know these fucking players.... All of this shit is just making sense and blowing my fucking mind. All of these old articles that really didn't seem like anything over a year ago... are now really making things crystal clear.
Donald Trump Settled a Real Estate Lawsuit, and a Criminal Case Was Closed
By MIKE McINTIREAPRIL 5, 2016
Photo
The Trump SoHo building, a 46-story luxury condominium-hotel in Lower Manhattan.CreditTodd Heisler/The New York Times
For Donald J. Trump, it is a long-held legal strategy, if not a point of pride, to avoid knuckling under to plaintiffs in court.
“I don’t settle lawsuits — very rare — because once you settle lawsuits, everybody sues you,” he said recently.
But Mr. Trump made an exception when buyers of units in Trump SoHo, a 46-story luxury condominium-hotel in Lower Manhattan, asserted that they had been defrauded by inflated claims made by Mr. Trump, his children and others of brisk sales in the struggling project. He and his co-defendants settled the case in November 2011, agreeing to refund 90 percent of $3.16 million in deposits, while admitting no wrongdoing.
The backdrop to that unusual denouement was a gathering legal storm that threatened to cast a harsh light on how he did business. Besides the fraud accusations, a separate lawsuit claimed that Trump SoHo was developed with the undisclosed involvement of convicted felons and financing from questionable sources in Russia and Kazakhstan.
And hovering over it all was a criminal investigation, previously unreported, by the Manhattan district attorney into whether the fraud alleged by the condo buyers broke any laws, according to documents and interviews with five people familiar with it. The buyers initially helped in the investigation, but as part of their lawsuit settlement, they had to notify prosecutors that they no longer wished to do so.
The criminal case was eventually closed.
Mr. Trump’s campaign for the Republican presidential nomination rests on the notion, relentlessly promoted by the candidate himself, that his record of business deals has prepared him better than his rivals for running the country. An examination of Trump SoHo provides a window into his handling of one such deal and finds that decisions on important matters like whom to become partners with and how to market the project led him into a thicket of litigation and controversy.
Trump SoHo is one of several instances in which Mr. Trump’s boastfulness — a hallmark of his career and his campaign — has been accused of crossing the line into fraud. Other lawsuits have charged that he peddled worthless real estate sales courses and misled investors into thinking he had built hotels when in fact he had only licensed his name to them. He has won several cases at trial and is continuing to fight others.
Alan Garten, the general counsel for the Trump Organization, said that the condo buyers’ lawsuit was not focused on Mr. Trump himself “in any material way” and that there was little reason not to settle it, adding that it cost Mr. Trump nothing. “It was solely a function of returning deposits,” Mr. Garten said.
He described the case as “buyer’s remorse,” in which people who bought real estate at the wrong time turned to the courts to recoup their investment.
Mr. Garten would not talk about the criminal investigation or whether it was a factor in the decision to settle.
“The terms of the settlement are confidential, and thus I’m not at liberty to discuss them,” he said.
The district attorney’s office declined to comment, saying it could not provide information on “a criminal investigation which does not result in an arrest or prosecution.”
When Mr. Trump and his co-defendants made the decision to settle the condo buyers’ lawsuit in 2011, it was a far cry from the heady days of 2006, when Mr. Trump closed an episode of his hit television show “The Apprentice” with a splashy plug for Trump SoHo. In typical Trump fashion, he piled on the plaudits for “my latest development.”
“When it’s completed in 2008,” he said, “this brilliant $370 million work of art will be an awe-inspiring masterpiece.”
Photo
Mr. Trump with Tevfik Arif, center, and Felix H. Sater at the official unveiling of Trump SoHo in September 2007, when it was still under construction. CreditMark Von Holden/WireImage
Jumping In With New Partners
To the artists and creative types inhabiting its trendy downtown Manhattan neighborhood, Trump SoHo was an oxymoron from the start. Many of them loudly opposed a huge glass tower at 246 Spring Street that would stab the sky high above its low-key surroundings.
If the plans for it attracted controversy, so too would the company most responsible for its development: Bayrock Group.
Mr. Trump was foggy on how he first came to do business with Bayrock, a small development company whose offices were in Trump Tower in Midtown. In a deposition a few years ago, he said it might have been a Bayrock associate, Felix H. Sater, who first approached him in the early 2000s.
Mr. Sater, a Russian immigrant, had recently joined Bayrock at the behest of its founder, Tevfik Arif, a former Soviet-era commerce official originally from Kazakhstan. Bayrock, which was developing commercial properties in Brooklyn, proposed that Mr. Trump license his name to hotel projects in Florida, Arizona and New York, including Trump SoHo.
The other development partner for Trump SoHo was the Sapir Organization, whose founder, Tamir Sapir, was from the former Soviet republic of Georgia. In addition to receiving a licensing agreement, Mr. Trump would manage the completed condo-hotel, and he was also given a minor equity interest in it.
Emails and testimony in several lawsuits show that Mr. Sater and Mr. Arif worked closely with Mr. Trump and others in the Trump Organization. Mr. Trump was particularly taken with Mr. Arif’s overseas connections. In a deposition, Mr. Trump said that the two had discussed “numerous deals all over the world” and that Mr. Arif had brought potential Russian investors to Mr. Trump’s office to meet him.
“Bayrock knew the people, knew the investors, and in some cases I believe they were friends of Mr. Arif,” Mr. Trump said. “And this was going to be Trump International Hotel and Tower Moscow, Kiev, Istanbul, etc., Poland, Warsaw.”
What sort of due diligence Mr. Trump did before jumping in with his new partners is unclear. But he, as well as many others, apparently missed some dark spots on Mr. Sater’s résumé. Mr. Garten said the Trump Organization typically did a background check on potential business partners like Bayrock, but not on their individual employees, so nothing about Mr. Sater would have turned up.
Mr. Sater was convicted and sent to prison in 1993 after a New York bar fight in which he stabbed a man in the face with a broken margarita glass. That was a matter of public record. However, what few people beyond insiders at Bayrock knew was that five years later, Mr. Sater was implicated in a huge stock manipulation scheme involving Mafia figures and Russian criminals — and that he became a confidential F.B.I. informant.
Recently unsealed federal court records show that Mr. Sater helped the government disrupt an organized crime ring on Wall Street and deal with an unexplained national security matter involving his foreign connections. He was not the only F.B.I. informant in Bayrock’s offices. Another was Salvatore Lauria, an associate of Mr. Sater, who sometimes showed up to work wearing a court-ordered ankle monitor.
Mr. Lauria brokered a $50 million investment in Trump SoHo and three other Bayrock projects by an Icelandic firm preferred by wealthy Russians “in favor with” President Vladimir V. Putin, according to a lawsuit against Bayrock by one of its former executives. The Icelandic company, FL Group, was identified in a Bayrock investor presentation as a “strategic partner,” along with Alexander Mashkevich, a billionaire once charged in a corruption case involving fees paid by a Belgian company seeking business in Kazakhstan; that case was settled with no admission of guilt.
Photo
Mr. Trump in 2010 with, from left, his children Eric, Ivanka and Donald Jr. at the Trump SoHo ribbon-cutting ceremony. CreditJessica Rinaldi/Reuters
Slowing Sales and a Lawsuit
The official unveiling of Trump SoHo in September 2007 was quintessential Trump: a red-carpet announcement followed by a big bash, where flavored vodka flowed, dancers whirled and models wandered about. Amid the hoopla, Mr. Trump took the microphone to extol the greatness of the project. Standing beside him, beaming, were Mr. Arif and Mr. Sater.
The timing of Trump SoHo’s completion and marketing could hardly have been worse. The real estate bubble was bursting, and the global economy was on the brink of crisis as the developers began advertising luxury condo-hotel units costing as much as tens of millions of dollars.
The economics of the investment were largely untested in New York real estate. To get around residential zoning restrictions, owners of Trump SoHo units were allowed to live in them only 120 days a year. The rest of the time, the units would be rented as hotel rooms, with the owners sharing in the revenue.
The project was marketed aggressively to potential investors overseas, where exchange rates were favorable and the Trump brand carried a certain cachet. Many early buyers were from Europe, including a French former soccer star, Olivier Dacourt, who put down a deposit of $460,400 on a $2.3 million unit.
Trump SoHo
Donald J. Trump described his development as an “awe-inspiring masterpiece” on “The Apprentice.”
Credit: YouTube
After an initial flurry of activity, the pace of sales slowed considerably. In addition to the economic decline, Trump SoHo was jolted by bad publicity when The New York Times published an article in December 2007 revealing Mr. Sater’s criminal past.
According to data the Trump SoHo developers filed with state and federal agencies, only 15 to 30 percent of the units had been sold by the start of 2009. But those numbers did not come close to the grand-sounding sales figures promoted, publicly and in private, by people affiliated with Trump SoHo, according to a lawsuit filed in August 2010 by Mr. Dacourt and other people who had bought units.
In June 2008, Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka was quoted in a Reuters article saying that about 60 percent of the units had been sold. In April 2009, Mr. Trump’s son Donald Jr. appeared in another news article saying that 55 percent of the units were sold by March of that year. More purported cases of puffery occurred in emails and statements by sales agents.
The lawsuit also suggested that Mr. Trump had contributed to the deception, citing a claim he made at the project’s unveiling. Depending on the news account, he said 3,200 prospective purchasers either had signed up to see the units or had requested applications to buy them; the plaintiffs argued that this figure was exaggerated, given how few units had actually been sold at the time. The Trumps and the other defendants denied that there had been any deception.
The inflated numbers were more than just harmless self-promotion and amounted to fraudulent enticement of investors, who believed they were buying into a project that was healthier than it actually was, said Adam Leitman Bailey, the lawyer representing the buyers.
“They relied on these misrepresentations to their detriment,” he said.
The people familiar with the criminal investigation said that not long after Mr. Bailey’s lawsuit was filed, the district attorney’s office began looking into the allegations it had raised. These people insisted on anonymity for fear of legal repercussions from speaking about confidential agreements or sealed criminal matters.
Documents reviewed by The Times, including a state grand jury subpoena, make clear that an area of focus for prosecutors was determining whether the accusations in Mr. Bailey’s lawsuit rose to the level of a crime. The investigation was being handled by the Major Economic Crimes Bureau.
Photo
Trump SoHo’s condo-hotel concept did not pan out, but the property remained open and became a popular luxury hotel. CreditTodd Heisler/The New York Times
Gradually Cutting Ties
Shortly before the condo buyers’ lawsuit was filed, another suit appeared, this one by Jody Kriss, a former finance director of Bayrock. It claimed that by concealing Mr. Sater’s criminal record, Bayrock had committed fraud on banks and investors with which it did business. Mr. Trump is not a defendant in that case, which is continuing.
Mr. Kriss’s lawsuit was filled with unflattering details of how Bayrock operated, including allegations that it had occasionally received unexplained infusions of cash from accounts in Kazakhstan and Russia. Bayrock and Trump SoHo drew more negative headlines in October 2010, when news spread from Turkey that Mr. Arif had been aboard a luxury yacht raided by the police, who were investigating a suspected prostitution ring that catered to wealthy businessmen. He was charged but later acquitted.
The next year, when it was clear that Mr. Bailey’s lawsuit would be allowed to proceed and with the district attorney’s criminal investigation continuing, Mr. Trump and his co-defendants agreed to settle the condo buyers’ suit. The financial terms were announced publicly, but another part of the settlement was kept secret.
That part required the plaintiffs to notify any investigative agency with which they “may have previously cooperated” that they did not want to “participate in any investigation or criminal prosecution” related to matters in the lawsuit, according to a confidentiality agreement signed by more than 20 people. The plaintiffs could respond to a subpoena or court order, but would also have to notify the defendants that they had received it, the agreement said. The criminal investigation was closed sometime afterward.
As for Trump SoHo, the condo-hotel concept did not pan out. Only about a third of the units were ultimately sold, and one of the project’s lenders foreclosed on the rest, although the property remained open and became a popular luxury hotel, still managed by Mr. Trump’s company.
Mr. Sater left Bayrock after the news of his criminal background was reported. But even after that, his association with Mr. Trump did not end. The Trump Organization later gave him a business card identifying him as a “senior advisor” to Mr. Trump, as well an office. Mr. Garten, the general counsel for the organization, said that Mr. Sater was never an employee, but that he had worked independently to steer potential deals to Mr. Trump. The arrangement lasted about six months, Mr. Garten said. Mr. Sater declined to comment on his dealings with Mr. Trump or with Bayrock.
By the time Mr. Trump sat for a deposition in a lawsuit in November 2013, it was clear he no longer saw the benefit of knowing the Bayrock executives with whom he had once completed big deals. (Key Trump Phrase.. for lying) He said he barely knew Mr. Arif: “I mean, I’ve seen him a couple of times; I have met him.”
As for Mr. Sater, “if he were sitting in the room right now,” Mr. Trump said, “I really wouldn’t know what he looked like.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/06/us/politics/donald-trump-soho-settlement.html
I mean gawd damn....
Donald Trump Settled a Real Estate Lawsuit, and a Criminal Case Was Closed
By MIKE McINTIREAPRIL 5, 2016
Photo
The Trump SoHo building, a 46-story luxury condominium-hotel in Lower Manhattan.CreditTodd Heisler/The New York Times
For Donald J. Trump, it is a long-held legal strategy, if not a point of pride, to avoid knuckling under to plaintiffs in court.
“I don’t settle lawsuits — very rare — because once you settle lawsuits, everybody sues you,” he said recently.
But Mr. Trump made an exception when buyers of units in Trump SoHo, a 46-story luxury condominium-hotel in Lower Manhattan, asserted that they had been defrauded by inflated claims made by Mr. Trump, his children and others of brisk sales in the struggling project. He and his co-defendants settled the case in November 2011, agreeing to refund 90 percent of $3.16 million in deposits, while admitting no wrongdoing.
The backdrop to that unusual denouement was a gathering legal storm that threatened to cast a harsh light on how he did business. Besides the fraud accusations, a separate lawsuit claimed that Trump SoHo was developed with the undisclosed involvement of convicted felons and financing from questionable sources in Russia and Kazakhstan.
And hovering over it all was a criminal investigation, previously unreported, by the Manhattan district attorney into whether the fraud alleged by the condo buyers broke any laws, according to documents and interviews with five people familiar with it. The buyers initially helped in the investigation, but as part of their lawsuit settlement, they had to notify prosecutors that they no longer wished to do so.
The criminal case was eventually closed.
Mr. Trump’s campaign for the Republican presidential nomination rests on the notion, relentlessly promoted by the candidate himself, that his record of business deals has prepared him better than his rivals for running the country. An examination of Trump SoHo provides a window into his handling of one such deal and finds that decisions on important matters like whom to become partners with and how to market the project led him into a thicket of litigation and controversy.
Trump SoHo is one of several instances in which Mr. Trump’s boastfulness — a hallmark of his career and his campaign — has been accused of crossing the line into fraud. Other lawsuits have charged that he peddled worthless real estate sales courses and misled investors into thinking he had built hotels when in fact he had only licensed his name to them. He has won several cases at trial and is continuing to fight others.
Alan Garten, the general counsel for the Trump Organization, said that the condo buyers’ lawsuit was not focused on Mr. Trump himself “in any material way” and that there was little reason not to settle it, adding that it cost Mr. Trump nothing. “It was solely a function of returning deposits,” Mr. Garten said.
He described the case as “buyer’s remorse,” in which people who bought real estate at the wrong time turned to the courts to recoup their investment.
Mr. Garten would not talk about the criminal investigation or whether it was a factor in the decision to settle.
“The terms of the settlement are confidential, and thus I’m not at liberty to discuss them,” he said.
The district attorney’s office declined to comment, saying it could not provide information on “a criminal investigation which does not result in an arrest or prosecution.”
When Mr. Trump and his co-defendants made the decision to settle the condo buyers’ lawsuit in 2011, it was a far cry from the heady days of 2006, when Mr. Trump closed an episode of his hit television show “The Apprentice” with a splashy plug for Trump SoHo. In typical Trump fashion, he piled on the plaudits for “my latest development.”
“When it’s completed in 2008,” he said, “this brilliant $370 million work of art will be an awe-inspiring masterpiece.”
Photo
Mr. Trump with Tevfik Arif, center, and Felix H. Sater at the official unveiling of Trump SoHo in September 2007, when it was still under construction. CreditMark Von Holden/WireImage
Jumping In With New Partners
To the artists and creative types inhabiting its trendy downtown Manhattan neighborhood, Trump SoHo was an oxymoron from the start. Many of them loudly opposed a huge glass tower at 246 Spring Street that would stab the sky high above its low-key surroundings.
If the plans for it attracted controversy, so too would the company most responsible for its development: Bayrock Group.
Mr. Trump was foggy on how he first came to do business with Bayrock, a small development company whose offices were in Trump Tower in Midtown. In a deposition a few years ago, he said it might have been a Bayrock associate, Felix H. Sater, who first approached him in the early 2000s.
Mr. Sater, a Russian immigrant, had recently joined Bayrock at the behest of its founder, Tevfik Arif, a former Soviet-era commerce official originally from Kazakhstan. Bayrock, which was developing commercial properties in Brooklyn, proposed that Mr. Trump license his name to hotel projects in Florida, Arizona and New York, including Trump SoHo.
The other development partner for Trump SoHo was the Sapir Organization, whose founder, Tamir Sapir, was from the former Soviet republic of Georgia. In addition to receiving a licensing agreement, Mr. Trump would manage the completed condo-hotel, and he was also given a minor equity interest in it.
Emails and testimony in several lawsuits show that Mr. Sater and Mr. Arif worked closely with Mr. Trump and others in the Trump Organization. Mr. Trump was particularly taken with Mr. Arif’s overseas connections. In a deposition, Mr. Trump said that the two had discussed “numerous deals all over the world” and that Mr. Arif had brought potential Russian investors to Mr. Trump’s office to meet him.
“Bayrock knew the people, knew the investors, and in some cases I believe they were friends of Mr. Arif,” Mr. Trump said. “And this was going to be Trump International Hotel and Tower Moscow, Kiev, Istanbul, etc., Poland, Warsaw.”
What sort of due diligence Mr. Trump did before jumping in with his new partners is unclear. But he, as well as many others, apparently missed some dark spots on Mr. Sater’s résumé. Mr. Garten said the Trump Organization typically did a background check on potential business partners like Bayrock, but not on their individual employees, so nothing about Mr. Sater would have turned up.
Mr. Sater was convicted and sent to prison in 1993 after a New York bar fight in which he stabbed a man in the face with a broken margarita glass. That was a matter of public record. However, what few people beyond insiders at Bayrock knew was that five years later, Mr. Sater was implicated in a huge stock manipulation scheme involving Mafia figures and Russian criminals — and that he became a confidential F.B.I. informant.
Recently unsealed federal court records show that Mr. Sater helped the government disrupt an organized crime ring on Wall Street and deal with an unexplained national security matter involving his foreign connections. He was not the only F.B.I. informant in Bayrock’s offices. Another was Salvatore Lauria, an associate of Mr. Sater, who sometimes showed up to work wearing a court-ordered ankle monitor.
Mr. Lauria brokered a $50 million investment in Trump SoHo and three other Bayrock projects by an Icelandic firm preferred by wealthy Russians “in favor with” President Vladimir V. Putin, according to a lawsuit against Bayrock by one of its former executives. The Icelandic company, FL Group, was identified in a Bayrock investor presentation as a “strategic partner,” along with Alexander Mashkevich, a billionaire once charged in a corruption case involving fees paid by a Belgian company seeking business in Kazakhstan; that case was settled with no admission of guilt.
Photo
Mr. Trump in 2010 with, from left, his children Eric, Ivanka and Donald Jr. at the Trump SoHo ribbon-cutting ceremony. CreditJessica Rinaldi/Reuters
Slowing Sales and a Lawsuit
The official unveiling of Trump SoHo in September 2007 was quintessential Trump: a red-carpet announcement followed by a big bash, where flavored vodka flowed, dancers whirled and models wandered about. Amid the hoopla, Mr. Trump took the microphone to extol the greatness of the project. Standing beside him, beaming, were Mr. Arif and Mr. Sater.
The timing of Trump SoHo’s completion and marketing could hardly have been worse. The real estate bubble was bursting, and the global economy was on the brink of crisis as the developers began advertising luxury condo-hotel units costing as much as tens of millions of dollars.
The economics of the investment were largely untested in New York real estate. To get around residential zoning restrictions, owners of Trump SoHo units were allowed to live in them only 120 days a year. The rest of the time, the units would be rented as hotel rooms, with the owners sharing in the revenue.
The project was marketed aggressively to potential investors overseas, where exchange rates were favorable and the Trump brand carried a certain cachet. Many early buyers were from Europe, including a French former soccer star, Olivier Dacourt, who put down a deposit of $460,400 on a $2.3 million unit.
Trump SoHo
Donald J. Trump described his development as an “awe-inspiring masterpiece” on “The Apprentice.”
Credit: YouTube
After an initial flurry of activity, the pace of sales slowed considerably. In addition to the economic decline, Trump SoHo was jolted by bad publicity when The New York Times published an article in December 2007 revealing Mr. Sater’s criminal past.
According to data the Trump SoHo developers filed with state and federal agencies, only 15 to 30 percent of the units had been sold by the start of 2009. But those numbers did not come close to the grand-sounding sales figures promoted, publicly and in private, by people affiliated with Trump SoHo, according to a lawsuit filed in August 2010 by Mr. Dacourt and other people who had bought units.
In June 2008, Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka was quoted in a Reuters article saying that about 60 percent of the units had been sold. In April 2009, Mr. Trump’s son Donald Jr. appeared in another news article saying that 55 percent of the units were sold by March of that year. More purported cases of puffery occurred in emails and statements by sales agents.
The lawsuit also suggested that Mr. Trump had contributed to the deception, citing a claim he made at the project’s unveiling. Depending on the news account, he said 3,200 prospective purchasers either had signed up to see the units or had requested applications to buy them; the plaintiffs argued that this figure was exaggerated, given how few units had actually been sold at the time. The Trumps and the other defendants denied that there had been any deception.
The inflated numbers were more than just harmless self-promotion and amounted to fraudulent enticement of investors, who believed they were buying into a project that was healthier than it actually was, said Adam Leitman Bailey, the lawyer representing the buyers.
“They relied on these misrepresentations to their detriment,” he said.
The people familiar with the criminal investigation said that not long after Mr. Bailey’s lawsuit was filed, the district attorney’s office began looking into the allegations it had raised. These people insisted on anonymity for fear of legal repercussions from speaking about confidential agreements or sealed criminal matters.
Documents reviewed by The Times, including a state grand jury subpoena, make clear that an area of focus for prosecutors was determining whether the accusations in Mr. Bailey’s lawsuit rose to the level of a crime. The investigation was being handled by the Major Economic Crimes Bureau.
Photo
Trump SoHo’s condo-hotel concept did not pan out, but the property remained open and became a popular luxury hotel. CreditTodd Heisler/The New York Times
Gradually Cutting Ties
Shortly before the condo buyers’ lawsuit was filed, another suit appeared, this one by Jody Kriss, a former finance director of Bayrock. It claimed that by concealing Mr. Sater’s criminal record, Bayrock had committed fraud on banks and investors with which it did business. Mr. Trump is not a defendant in that case, which is continuing.
Mr. Kriss’s lawsuit was filled with unflattering details of how Bayrock operated, including allegations that it had occasionally received unexplained infusions of cash from accounts in Kazakhstan and Russia. Bayrock and Trump SoHo drew more negative headlines in October 2010, when news spread from Turkey that Mr. Arif had been aboard a luxury yacht raided by the police, who were investigating a suspected prostitution ring that catered to wealthy businessmen. He was charged but later acquitted.
The next year, when it was clear that Mr. Bailey’s lawsuit would be allowed to proceed and with the district attorney’s criminal investigation continuing, Mr. Trump and his co-defendants agreed to settle the condo buyers’ suit. The financial terms were announced publicly, but another part of the settlement was kept secret.
That part required the plaintiffs to notify any investigative agency with which they “may have previously cooperated” that they did not want to “participate in any investigation or criminal prosecution” related to matters in the lawsuit, according to a confidentiality agreement signed by more than 20 people. The plaintiffs could respond to a subpoena or court order, but would also have to notify the defendants that they had received it, the agreement said. The criminal investigation was closed sometime afterward.
As for Trump SoHo, the condo-hotel concept did not pan out. Only about a third of the units were ultimately sold, and one of the project’s lenders foreclosed on the rest, although the property remained open and became a popular luxury hotel, still managed by Mr. Trump’s company.
Mr. Sater left Bayrock after the news of his criminal background was reported. But even after that, his association with Mr. Trump did not end. The Trump Organization later gave him a business card identifying him as a “senior advisor” to Mr. Trump, as well an office. Mr. Garten, the general counsel for the organization, said that Mr. Sater was never an employee, but that he had worked independently to steer potential deals to Mr. Trump. The arrangement lasted about six months, Mr. Garten said. Mr. Sater declined to comment on his dealings with Mr. Trump or with Bayrock.
By the time Mr. Trump sat for a deposition in a lawsuit in November 2013, it was clear he no longer saw the benefit of knowing the Bayrock executives with whom he had once completed big deals. (Key Trump Phrase.. for lying) He said he barely knew Mr. Arif: “I mean, I’ve seen him a couple of times; I have met him.”
As for Mr. Sater, “if he were sitting in the room right now,” Mr. Trump said, “I really wouldn’t know what he looked like.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/06/us/politics/donald-trump-soho-settlement.html
I mean gawd damn....
I think this was the end game the entire time and that shit was a mutherfucking masterstroke....
And so far there isn't a gawd damn thing directly linking him to shit... and since our own government isn't trying to push the matter on this... The rest of the world doesn't give a shit. Why should they? We aren't trying to push economic sanctions on Russia.
Yeah. My feeling is that this was the plan all along. Stroke Trump's ego and pull strings to get him into office, then embarrass him and destabilize the government afterwards. The only thing is I don't think they really thought that he would maintain the blind support that he has, and they underestimated how dense he would be once in office. I think at the very least, they thought he would stay stable enough to get some sanctions lifted, but that wasn't even the true endgame.
We're going to be left looking like idiots while Trump is in office, then looking weak as shit as we try to put the pieces back together. The dog and pony show that is the GOP won't actually go 100 percent into fixing what's broken anymore than the Dems will. And the media, once the dust clears, will go back to dicking around like they usually do.
thats dried and flaking paint...Man on Man... Now that I know these fucking players.... All of this shit is just making sense and blowing my fucking mind. All of these old articles that really didn't seem like anything over a year ago... are now really making things crystal clear.
Donald Trump Settled a Real Estate Lawsuit, and a Criminal Case Was Closed
By MIKE McINTIREAPRIL 5, 2016
Photo
The Trump SoHo building, a 46-story luxury condominium-hotel in Lower Manhattan.CreditTodd Heisler/The New York Times
For Donald J. Trump, it is a long-held legal strategy, if not a point of pride, to avoid knuckling under to plaintiffs in court.
“I don’t settle lawsuits — very rare — because once you settle lawsuits, everybody sues you,” he said recently.
But Mr. Trump made an exception when buyers of units in Trump SoHo, a 46-story luxury condominium-hotel in Lower Manhattan, asserted that they had been defrauded by inflated claims made by Mr. Trump, his children and others of brisk sales in the struggling project. He and his co-defendants settled the case in November 2011, agreeing to refund 90 percent of $3.16 million in deposits, while admitting no wrongdoing.
The backdrop to that unusual denouement was a gathering legal storm that threatened to cast a harsh light on how he did business. Besides the fraud accusations, a separate lawsuit claimed that Trump SoHo was developed with the undisclosed involvement of convicted felons and financing from questionable sources in Russia and Kazakhstan.
And hovering over it all was a criminal investigation, previously unreported, by the Manhattan district attorney into whether the fraud alleged by the condo buyers broke any laws, according to documents and interviews with five people familiar with it. The buyers initially helped in the investigation, but as part of their lawsuit settlement, they had to notify prosecutors that they no longer wished to do so.
The criminal case was eventually closed.
Mr. Trump’s campaign for the Republican presidential nomination rests on the notion, relentlessly promoted by the candidate himself, that his record of business deals has prepared him better than his rivals for running the country. An examination of Trump SoHo provides a window into his handling of one such deal and finds that decisions on important matters like whom to become partners with and how to market the project led him into a thicket of litigation and controversy.
Trump SoHo is one of several instances in which Mr. Trump’s boastfulness — a hallmark of his career and his campaign — has been accused of crossing the line into fraud. Other lawsuits have charged that he peddled worthless real estate sales courses and misled investors into thinking he had built hotels when in fact he had only licensed his name to them. He has won several cases at trial and is continuing to fight others.
Alan Garten, the general counsel for the Trump Organization, said that the condo buyers’ lawsuit was not focused on Mr. Trump himself “in any material way” and that there was little reason not to settle it, adding that it cost Mr. Trump nothing. “It was solely a function of returning deposits,” Mr. Garten said.
He described the case as “buyer’s remorse,” in which people who bought real estate at the wrong time turned to the courts to recoup their investment.
Mr. Garten would not talk about the criminal investigation or whether it was a factor in the decision to settle.
“The terms of the settlement are confidential, and thus I’m not at liberty to discuss them,” he said.
The district attorney’s office declined to comment, saying it could not provide information on “a criminal investigation which does not result in an arrest or prosecution.”
When Mr. Trump and his co-defendants made the decision to settle the condo buyers’ lawsuit in 2011, it was a far cry from the heady days of 2006, when Mr. Trump closed an episode of his hit television show “The Apprentice” with a splashy plug for Trump SoHo. In typical Trump fashion, he piled on the plaudits for “my latest development.”
“When it’s completed in 2008,” he said, “this brilliant $370 million work of art will be an awe-inspiring masterpiece.”
Photo
Mr. Trump with Tevfik Arif, center, and Felix H. Sater at the official unveiling of Trump SoHo in September 2007, when it was still under construction. CreditMark Von Holden/WireImage
Jumping In With New Partners
To the artists and creative types inhabiting its trendy downtown Manhattan neighborhood, Trump SoHo was an oxymoron from the start. Many of them loudly opposed a huge glass tower at 246 Spring Street that would stab the sky high above its low-key surroundings.
If the plans for it attracted controversy, so too would the company most responsible for its development: Bayrock Group.
Mr. Trump was foggy on how he first came to do business with Bayrock, a small development company whose offices were in Trump Tower in Midtown. In a deposition a few years ago, he said it might have been a Bayrock associate, Felix H. Sater, who first approached him in the early 2000s.
Mr. Sater, a Russian immigrant, had recently joined Bayrock at the behest of its founder, Tevfik Arif, a former Soviet-era commerce official originally from Kazakhstan. Bayrock, which was developing commercial properties in Brooklyn, proposed that Mr. Trump license his name to hotel projects in Florida, Arizona and New York, including Trump SoHo.
The other development partner for Trump SoHo was the Sapir Organization, whose founder, Tamir Sapir, was from the former Soviet republic of Georgia. In addition to receiving a licensing agreement, Mr. Trump would manage the completed condo-hotel, and he was also given a minor equity interest in it.
Emails and testimony in several lawsuits show that Mr. Sater and Mr. Arif worked closely with Mr. Trump and others in the Trump Organization. Mr. Trump was particularly taken with Mr. Arif’s overseas connections. In a deposition, Mr. Trump said that the two had discussed “numerous deals all over the world” and that Mr. Arif had brought potential Russian investors to Mr. Trump’s office to meet him.
“Bayrock knew the people, knew the investors, and in some cases I believe they were friends of Mr. Arif,” Mr. Trump said. “And this was going to be Trump International Hotel and Tower Moscow, Kiev, Istanbul, etc., Poland, Warsaw.”
What sort of due diligence Mr. Trump did before jumping in with his new partners is unclear. But he, as well as many others, apparently missed some dark spots on Mr. Sater’s résumé. Mr. Garten said the Trump Organization typically did a background check on potential business partners like Bayrock, but not on their individual employees, so nothing about Mr. Sater would have turned up.
Mr. Sater was convicted and sent to prison in 1993 after a New York bar fight in which he stabbed a man in the face with a broken margarita glass. That was a matter of public record. However, what few people beyond insiders at Bayrock knew was that five years later, Mr. Sater was implicated in a huge stock manipulation scheme involving Mafia figures and Russian criminals — and that he became a confidential F.B.I. informant.
Recently unsealed federal court records show that Mr. Sater helped the government disrupt an organized crime ring on Wall Street and deal with an unexplained national security matter involving his foreign connections. He was not the only F.B.I. informant in Bayrock’s offices. Another was Salvatore Lauria, an associate of Mr. Sater, who sometimes showed up to work wearing a court-ordered ankle monitor.
Mr. Lauria brokered a $50 million investment in Trump SoHo and three other Bayrock projects by an Icelandic firm preferred by wealthy Russians “in favor with” President Vladimir V. Putin, according to a lawsuit against Bayrock by one of its former executives. The Icelandic company, FL Group, was identified in a Bayrock investor presentation as a “strategic partner,” along with Alexander Mashkevich, a billionaire once charged in a corruption case involving fees paid by a Belgian company seeking business in Kazakhstan; that case was settled with no admission of guilt.
Photo
Mr. Trump in 2010 with, from left, his children Eric, Ivanka and Donald Jr. at the Trump SoHo ribbon-cutting ceremony. CreditJessica Rinaldi/Reuters
Slowing Sales and a Lawsuit
The official unveiling of Trump SoHo in September 2007 was quintessential Trump: a red-carpet announcement followed by a big bash, where flavored vodka flowed, dancers whirled and models wandered about. Amid the hoopla, Mr. Trump took the microphone to extol the greatness of the project. Standing beside him, beaming, were Mr. Arif and Mr. Sater.
The timing of Trump SoHo’s completion and marketing could hardly have been worse. The real estate bubble was bursting, and the global economy was on the brink of crisis as the developers began advertising luxury condo-hotel units costing as much as tens of millions of dollars.
The economics of the investment were largely untested in New York real estate. To get around residential zoning restrictions, owners of Trump SoHo units were allowed to live in them only 120 days a year. The rest of the time, the units would be rented as hotel rooms, with the owners sharing in the revenue.
The project was marketed aggressively to potential investors overseas, where exchange rates were favorable and the Trump brand carried a certain cachet. Many early buyers were from Europe, including a French former soccer star, Olivier Dacourt, who put down a deposit of $460,400 on a $2.3 million unit.
Trump SoHo
Donald J. Trump described his development as an “awe-inspiring masterpiece” on “The Apprentice.”
Credit: YouTube
After an initial flurry of activity, the pace of sales slowed considerably. In addition to the economic decline, Trump SoHo was jolted by bad publicity when The New York Times published an article in December 2007 revealing Mr. Sater’s criminal past.
According to data the Trump SoHo developers filed with state and federal agencies, only 15 to 30 percent of the units had been sold by the start of 2009. But those numbers did not come close to the grand-sounding sales figures promoted, publicly and in private, by people affiliated with Trump SoHo, according to a lawsuit filed in August 2010 by Mr. Dacourt and other people who had bought units.
In June 2008, Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka was quoted in a Reuters article saying that about 60 percent of the units had been sold. In April 2009, Mr. Trump’s son Donald Jr. appeared in another news article saying that 55 percent of the units were sold by March of that year. More purported cases of puffery occurred in emails and statements by sales agents.
The lawsuit also suggested that Mr. Trump had contributed to the deception, citing a claim he made at the project’s unveiling. Depending on the news account, he said 3,200 prospective purchasers either had signed up to see the units or had requested applications to buy them; the plaintiffs argued that this figure was exaggerated, given how few units had actually been sold at the time. The Trumps and the other defendants denied that there had been any deception.
The inflated numbers were more than just harmless self-promotion and amounted to fraudulent enticement of investors, who believed they were buying into a project that was healthier than it actually was, said Adam Leitman Bailey, the lawyer representing the buyers.
“They relied on these misrepresentations to their detriment,” he said.
The people familiar with the criminal investigation said that not long after Mr. Bailey’s lawsuit was filed, the district attorney’s office began looking into the allegations it had raised. These people insisted on anonymity for fear of legal repercussions from speaking about confidential agreements or sealed criminal matters.
Documents reviewed by The Times, including a state grand jury subpoena, make clear that an area of focus for prosecutors was determining whether the accusations in Mr. Bailey’s lawsuit rose to the level of a crime. The investigation was being handled by the Major Economic Crimes Bureau.
Photo
Trump SoHo’s condo-hotel concept did not pan out, but the property remained open and became a popular luxury hotel. CreditTodd Heisler/The New York Times
Gradually Cutting Ties
Shortly before the condo buyers’ lawsuit was filed, another suit appeared, this one by Jody Kriss, a former finance director of Bayrock. It claimed that by concealing Mr. Sater’s criminal record, Bayrock had committed fraud on banks and investors with which it did business. Mr. Trump is not a defendant in that case, which is continuing.
Mr. Kriss’s lawsuit was filled with unflattering details of how Bayrock operated, including allegations that it had occasionally received unexplained infusions of cash from accounts in Kazakhstan and Russia. Bayrock and Trump SoHo drew more negative headlines in October 2010, when news spread from Turkey that Mr. Arif had been aboard a luxury yacht raided by the police, who were investigating a suspected prostitution ring that catered to wealthy businessmen. He was charged but later acquitted.
The next year, when it was clear that Mr. Bailey’s lawsuit would be allowed to proceed and with the district attorney’s criminal investigation continuing, Mr. Trump and his co-defendants agreed to settle the condo buyers’ suit. The financial terms were announced publicly, but another part of the settlement was kept secret.
That part required the plaintiffs to notify any investigative agency with which they “may have previously cooperated” that they did not want to “participate in any investigation or criminal prosecution” related to matters in the lawsuit, according to a confidentiality agreement signed by more than 20 people. The plaintiffs could respond to a subpoena or court order, but would also have to notify the defendants that they had received it, the agreement said. The criminal investigation was closed sometime afterward.
As for Trump SoHo, the condo-hotel concept did not pan out. Only about a third of the units were ultimately sold, and one of the project’s lenders foreclosed on the rest, although the property remained open and became a popular luxury hotel, still managed by Mr. Trump’s company.
Mr. Sater left Bayrock after the news of his criminal background was reported. But even after that, his association with Mr. Trump did not end. The Trump Organization later gave him a business card identifying him as a “senior advisor” to Mr. Trump, as well an office. Mr. Garten, the general counsel for the organization, said that Mr. Sater was never an employee, but that he had worked independently to steer potential deals to Mr. Trump. The arrangement lasted about six months, Mr. Garten said. Mr. Sater declined to comment on his dealings with Mr. Trump or with Bayrock.
By the time Mr. Trump sat for a deposition in a lawsuit in November 2013, it was clear he no longer saw the benefit of knowing the Bayrock executives with whom he had once completed big deals. (Key Trump Phrase.. for lying) He said he barely knew Mr. Arif: “I mean, I’ve seen him a couple of times; I have met him.”
As for Mr. Sater, “if he were sitting in the room right now,” Mr. Trump said, “I really wouldn’t know what he looked like.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/06/us/politics/donald-trump-soho-settlement.html
I mean gawd damn....
there isso much more to come
Banks and others have years of experience with him and how dirty he is
When / if they really break this all the way open- one of the headlines will target Trump's insolvency
he has been threadbare for years now - juggling debt to keep the illusion
They have already started reporting that Jared is a deadline away from financial peril but they are leaving out the peril includes personal bankruptcy because he is personally on the hook for the first building in NYC he bought, but so much craziness is going on that TV and print has left it alone
When / If they start reporting on Trump's lack of funds - its going be real ugly - the only truth he reacts to stronger than small hands
the current sanctions that are in place are devastating, imo if they were made worse there would be a valid argument in Russia for a hot war
He is going to prison.
I don't understand how he got away with money laundering by just paying a fine. Why didn't NJ officials contact the FBI.
No wonder he thinks he can do anything he wants.
Whats crazy is that if he didn't run for Pres he could probably still be getting away with this shit.
This, plus this is one of the best shows on the tube.I knew he died... I did not know the circumstances around his death.
Who leaves a note saying "No FOUL PLAY" unless you are.....
Trump is a fuck up - and he has been a useful idiot since the 80s
He is great bait for FBI - they have found illegal shit they wouldn't hear about just by watching the people that approach Trump
Think about it this way - Trump ran 2 casinos when AC had a monopoly on gambling for the northeast and laundered money through them but still went tits up on both -
thats everything you need know about his business skill, intelligence or competence
So the Feds let all the small shit slide because of the window that watching Trump gave them
Even with hundreds of millions in debt - it takes a special kind of person to get black balled from most US German UK, Chinese etc commercial and investment banks, AND be "physically escorted" out of Deutsche Bank